Position in chronology
MDP 17, 252
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from Susa (southwestern Iran), dating to the Uruk period, roughly 3200–3000 BCE. It belongs to the proto-Elamite tradition — one of the earliest writing systems in the world, still largely undeciphered — and records quantities of one or more commodities alongside a series of undeciphered sign-groups. Tablets like this were the bureaucratic tools of early urban institutions, tracking goods, animals, or rations in what may be one of humanity's first experiments in large-scale record-keeping. Because proto-Elamite script remains undeciphered, we can read the numerals but not the names of what is being counted.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet lists several entries, each pairing an unidentified commodity or category (represented by signs we cannot yet read) with a numerical count: two units in one entry, then a set of three different numerical notations adding up to a small total in another, then one unit of a further category, and finally five units of yet another. The commodity names and institutional context are lost to us — not because the tablet is destroyed, but because proto-Elamite writing has never been deciphered. What survives is the skeleton of an ancient accounting record: things were counted, and someone wrote the numbers down.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] M124 M298~a M379~d , 2(N01) [...] , [...] 1(N01)# 1(N39B) 1(N24) M218~g , 1(N01) M379~d |M036+M343~e|? M218~g , 5(N01)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] M124 M298~a M379~d , 2(N01) [...] , [...] 1(N01)# 1(N39B) 1(N24) M218~g , 1(N01) M379~d |M036+M343~e|? M218~g , 5(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 252. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008450) — 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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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.