Position in chronology
MDP 17, 228
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from ancient Susa (in modern Iran), dating to the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE. It is written in proto-Elamite, one of the world's earliest writing systems, which remains undeciphered. The tablet records quantities of commodities — probably goods managed by a temple or palace institution — using a numerical notation system whose values can be partially reconstructed even though the signs naming the commodities cannot yet be read. Tablets like this are the earliest paperwork of complex economic life: inventories kept by officials tracking the movement of goods before writing had developed enough to record language itself.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet lists several categories of goods (their names are unfortunately still unknown to us, as proto-Elamite writing has not been deciphered) alongside numerical quantities. One entry records a larger amount, another a smaller one, and so on down the list. The final line gives what appears to be a summary or total figure. The rest of the signs remain opaque — the numbers are legible, but the words they quantify are not yet readable by modern scholarship.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineM305[?], M387 M124 M081 |M036+1(N39C)|, 1(N24) 1(N30C@b) M387~eg M036, 1(N39B) M062, 1(N30D) M288, 1(N39B) 1(N24) 1(N30D) 1(N30C@b) 1(N34)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
M305#? , M387 M124 M081 |M036+1(N39C)| , 1(N24) 1(N30C@b) M387~eg M036 , 1(N39B) M062 , 1(N30D) M288 , 1(N39B) 1(N24) 1(N30D) 1(N30C@b) 1(N34)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 228. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008426) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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Related sources
One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.