Position in chronology
MDP 31, 024
About this tablet
A small proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (modern Shush, southwestern Iran), dating to roughly 3200–2900 BCE — among the earliest written records in the world. It records quantities of goods or commodities under category signs whose exact meaning remains undeciphered, making it a fascinating but still partially opaque window into the earliest Elamite bureaucracy. Proto-Elamite writing has not been fully decoded, so the signs here can be recognized and counted but not yet 'read' in the way a later cuneiform text can be. The tablet survives in several fragments, now held at the Louvre, and shows the typical format of proto-Elamite accounting: a classifier sign followed by a numeral.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet records a short list of commodities or resources, each assigned a quantity. The first entry logs 2 units under one category sign; the next two entries each record 1 unit under different classifiers. A fourth entry is too broken to give a number. One line records simply 1 unit with no readable classifier surviving. The final two lines are too damaged to read at all. The exact nature of the goods — whether animals, grain, personnel, or something else entirely — cannot be determined because proto-Elamite writing remains undeciphered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[Sign M305+M342 (commodity/category classifier)], 2 (units) [M291] [M371] [M320], 1 (unit) [x] [M301] [M057], 1 (unit) [M263~1] [M347] [...], [...] [...], 1 (unit) [x] [x] [x], [...] [x] [x] [x] [...], [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
|M305+M342|# , 2(N01) M291 M371 M320# , 1(N01)# x M301 M057 , 1(N01) M263~1 M347# [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N01) x x x , [...] x x x [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 31, 024. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009364) — 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.