Position in chronology
MDP 06, 329
About this tablet
A heavily damaged proto-cuneiform accounting tablet from Susa (ancient Elam, in modern southwestern Iran), dating to the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE — among the very earliest writing in human history. The surviving signs record quantities of commodities or categories of goods using early numerical notation (the N39B, N24, and N30C number signs), alongside unread commodity or category signs whose meanings have not yet been established. Tablets like this one were the administrative backbone of early urban economies: scribes used them to track distributions, receipts, or allocations of goods within a temple or palace institution. Its fragmentary state and the use of archaic, not-yet-fully-deciphered sign forms make it typical of the Susa corpus and a valuable data point for reconstructing the origins of writing itself.
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 — entries recording amounts (three units of one kind, two of another, one plus two of a third, and so on) alongside category signs whose meanings we cannot yet read. Several lines are too broken or eroded to recover. The overall picture is an administrative tally: someone was counting and recording goods, probably for distribution or receipt within a large institution. The rest is lost to damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] [...] 3(N39B) [...] [...] [...] 2(N39B) |M305+X| [...] [...] [...] [...] 1(N24) 2(N30C)? [...] [...] 3(N39B) M197? [...] [...] [...] [...] 2(N39B) 1(N24) M056~f [...] |M305+M288| M056~f [...] [...] [...] 1(N24)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. 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
[...] , [...] , [...] 3(N39B)# [...] [...] , [...] 2(N39B)# |M305+X|# [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N24)# 2(N30C)#? [...] [...] , 3(N39B) M197#? [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 2(N39B) 1(N24) M056~f# , [...] |M305+M288| M056~f , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N24)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 329. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P008118) — 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
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
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