Position in chronology
MDP 17, 349
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged Proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (modern Shush, southwestern Iran), dating to around 3100–2900 BCE — one of the world's earliest writing systems, still largely undeciphered. The surviving entries consist of numerical notations (1 and 9 units, in the standard Proto-Elamite number system) paired with unread commodity or category signs, probably recording allocations or inventories of goods managed by a temple or palace institution. Proto-Elamite tablets like this one are among the earliest written records from Iran, contemporary with the earliest Sumerian texts from Mesopotamia, and represent a distinct and still-mysterious scribal tradition. The tablet survives in several joining or associated fragments, as visible in the photograph.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet records what appear to be small quantities of goods — one unit of something, nine units of something else — each entry paired with category markers whose exact meaning remains unknown. The commodities and their classifiers cannot yet be read phonetically. Several lines are too broken to make out. The surviving content is essentially a partial tally sheet: quantities assigned to or associated with particular categories of goods, in a script and language we have not yet fully decoded.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] x M388 M066~a M087 [...], [...] [...], 1(N01) M259 M150 [...], [...] M320# M388# M346#?, [...] [...], 9(N01)# M346, [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] x M388 M066~a M087 [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N01) M259 M150 [...] , [...] M320# M388# M346#? , [...] [...] , 9(N01)# M346 , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 349. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008547) — 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.