Position in chronology
MDP 17, 342
About this tablet
A damaged proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa, dating to the Uruk period (roughly 3100–2900 BCE), now held at the Louvre as museum object Sb 22497. Proto-Elamite is the earliest writing system used in ancient Iran, and like its contemporary proto-cuneiform from Mesopotamia, it was used almost exclusively to track economic data — quantities of goods, animals, or rations managed by a central institution. The numerical signs are legible, recording quantities in a well-understood counting system, but the commodity signs (M264~d, M036, M343~h) remain undeciphered: we know numbers were assigned to something, but not precisely what. This tablet is a small piece of the enormous proto-Elamite accounting archive from Susa, one of the oldest bureaucratic record-keeping systems in the world.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a broken accounting record. The surviving entries show numerical quantities — something like '3 units and 1 unit' in one entry, then a quantity of '1(N14) 3(N01) 1(N14@b) 2(N1@b)' associated with unidentified commodity signs in a third line, and a further partial entry at the bottom. The rest of the tablet is too damaged or broken to read. In modern terms, it would read something like: '[Item unknown]: 3 + 1. [Item unknown] [Item unknown]: 13 units, [sub-unit] 2. [Item unknown]: [partial count], remainder lost.'
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 3(N01) 1(N39B) M264~d [...] , [...] [...] M036 M343~h , 1(N14) 3(N01) 1(N14@b) 2(N1@b) [...] , [...] 1(N14)# 1(N01) 1(N30C)#? n(n@b)#
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , 3(N01) 1(N39B) M264~d [...] , [...] [...] M036 M343~h , 1(N14) 3(N01) 1(N14@b) 2(N1@b) [...] , [...] 1(N14)# 1(N01) 1(N30C)#? n(n@b)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 342. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008540) — 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.