Position in chronology
CahDAFI 8, 95 16
About this tablet
This is a small fragment of a proto-Elamite/proto-cuneiform numerical tablet from Susa (modern Shush), dating to the Uruk period — one of the very earliest administrative records from ancient Iran, before true writing had developed. It appears to be a tally of goods or commodities, each entry pairing an unread sign (a commodity, person, or institution marker) with a quantity expressed in the archaic numeral system. Most of the signs remain undeciphered by modern scholarship, so the tablet is best understood as raw bookkeeping data whose exact subject — grain, animals, labor, or something else — cannot yet be recovered.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This broken accounting tablet lists a series of entries, most of them now unreadable. Where legible, each line pairs an unidentified sign or commodity marker with a counted quantity — for example, one entry records a quantity of 1 of a larger counting-unit plus 2 of a smaller one, and another records 1 of the larger unit plus 3 of the smaller. The signs used for the commodities or categories themselves cannot currently be read, so we can tell that someone was recording quantities of something, but not what. The beginning and several other lines are lost to breakage, and the tablet ends with another illegible entry.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...], M377(#) M251(#) x x , [...] [...] , 1(N39B) M146(#) x , 1(N14) 2(N01) M387 M240 M096(#) , 1(N14) 3(N01) x x M218(#) M177~a(#) , 3(N01) x , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
[...] , M377# M251# x x , [...] [...] , 1(N39B) M146# x 1(N14) 2(N01) M387 M240 M096# , 1(N14) 3(N01) x x M218# M177~a# , 3(N01) x , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — CahDAFI 8, 95 16. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P009434) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.