Position in chronology
MDP 17, 383
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged proto-Elamite accounting tablet from Susa (modern Shush, Iran), dating to the late fourth millennium BCE — roughly 3100–2900 BCE. Proto-Elamite is the world's most numerically attested undeciphered writing system, used by administrators across the Iranian plateau to track commodities and personnel. This fragment, now held at the Louvre (Sb 22537), preserves a few numerical notations against commodity signs whose meanings remain unknown, typical of the terse ledger format in which goods were tallied by category. Its extreme fragmentation means only isolated sign-groups and numbers survive, but even this ruin is a data point in the ongoing international effort to crack proto-Elamite.
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 entries, each pairing an unidentified commodity sign with a quantity. One entry records a commodity (M438 + M209~a) against a count of roughly 11 units; another records commodity M059 against a single quantity notation; a further line preserves the numbers 1(N24) and 1(N30C). The remaining lines are too broken to read. The overall picture is a small accountant's tally — goods counted and logged — but because proto-Elamite is still undeciphered, we cannot say what those goods were.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] 2(N01) [...] [...] 1(N30C)? 1(N30D) M438 M209~a : 1(N14) 1(N01)# [...] [x] : 2(N01) M059 : 1(N39B) [x] [...] : [...] [...] [...] : 1(N24)# 1(N30C) [x] [...] : [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] 2(N01)# [...] , [...] 1(N30C)#? 1(N30D) M438 M209~a , 1(N14) 1(N01)# [...] x , 2(N01) M059 , 1(N39B) x [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N24)# 1(N30C) x [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 383. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008581) — 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.