Position in chronology
MDP 17, 235
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from ancient Susa (in modern Iran), dating to the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), before writing had fully developed into readable language. It records quantities of commodities — perhaps livestock, foodstuffs, or craft goods — using proto-Elamite signs whose meanings remain largely undeciphered today. Numbers (2 and 3 units) appear against each entry, suggesting an inventory or ration list kept by a temple or palace administrator. This tablet is a specimen of one of the world's earliest writing systems, a system we have still not fully cracked.
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 or commodities alongside small quantities — three units of one item, two of another, three of a third. The commodity signs themselves cannot yet be read with certainty, so the exact nature of the goods (animals, grain, textiles, or something else) remains unknown. Parts of the tablet are broken, and several lines are incomplete. What survives is essentially a short inventory: a bureaucrat at Susa tallying things up, entry by entry, in a script the modern world has not yet fully deciphered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] |M305+M288| M388 [...] , [...] [...] M297 M066 M348 , 3(N01) M066[...] , [...] [...] , 2(N01) M048~k M080~c M297 M066 M348 , [...] [...] , 3(N01)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] |M305+M288|# M388 [...] , [...] [...] M297 M066 M348 , 3(N01) M066# [...] , [...] [...] , 2(N01) M048~k M080~c M297 M066 M348# , [...] [...] , 3(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 235. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008433) — 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.