Position in chronology
MDP 17, 335
About this tablet
A small proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa, dating to the late fourth millennium BCE — among the earliest writing in human history. It records quantities of commodities or resources (the specific goods are not yet decipherable) assigned to different categories or institutional headings, with numerical notations in the proto-Elamite numerical system. Tablets like this one were produced by a scribal bureaucracy managing the redistribution of goods in one of the ancient world's first urban centres. The script remains undeciphered: we can read the numbers but not the words around them, making every such tablet a tantalising puzzle.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is too damaged and the script too incompletely understood to render as fluent modern prose. What survives records a series of commodity entries — each pairing one or more undeciphered sign-groups with a quantity: 1 unit of something recorded with sign M379; a group of signs that may form an institutional heading followed by 2 units; further entries with quantities of 1 and 2; and a final line where the count is partially broken. The entries appear to follow a consistent structure of category + quantity, possibly a summary or sub-total line at the end. Much of the tablet is broken and the rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] 1(N39B) M379 , 1(N24) M050~k[?] , [...] |M175+M136| M266~b M263 , 2(N01) M124 M377 [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N30C) M124 M024 M242~b[?] M096 M288 , [...] [x x] , 2(N39B) [...] M288[?] , n(N01)[?]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] 1(N39B)# M379 , 1(N24) M050~k#? , [...] |M175+M136|# M266~b M263 , 2(N01) M124 M377 [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N30C) M124 M024 M242~b#? M096 M288 , [...] x x , 2(N39B) [...] M288#? , n(N01)#?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 335. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008533) — 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.