Position in chronology
MDP 17, 377
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from ancient Susa (in modern Iran), dating to the Uruk period — roughly 3300–3000 BCE — and written in proto-Elamite, one of the earliest undeciphered writing systems in the world. It records quantities of one or more commodities against numerical notations, in the characteristic format of proto-Elamite accounting tablets: a commodity sign followed by a tally. The signs and numbers survive only in fragments, and the specific goods being counted cannot be identified with certainty. Tablets like this were the bookkeeping backbone of the first complex urban economies, tracking goods moving through institutional storehouses at Susa.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet is a list of quantities — most likely goods being counted and recorded by a temple or palace accountant. One entry records 2 units of something (M003~b M329); another shows 5 units; another shows M203~c against 1 unit; and further broken lines give counts of 3, then a larger aggregate. The last readable line shows a single higher-order numeral (1 N34). Most commodity identifiers are too damaged or undeciphered to name, and several lines are entirely lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our enginex [...] , [...] [...] M003~b M329 , 2(N14)# [...] , 5(N01) M203~c , 1(N14) [...] , 3(N01) M005~a [...] , [...] [...] , 2(N45) 1(N14) [...] [...] 3(N01) 1(N34)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
x [...] , [...] [...] M003~b M329 , 2(N14)# [...] , 5(N01) M203~c , 1(N14) [...] , 3(N01) M005~a [...] , [...] [...] , 2(N45) 1(N14) [...] [...] 3(N01) 1(N34)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 377. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008575) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
Related tablets
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.