Position in chronology
MDP 06, 385
About this tablet
A small, damaged administrative tablet from ancient Susa (in modern Iran), dating to the Uruk period (roughly 3300–3000 BCE), written in the proto-Elamite script — one of the world's earliest writing systems, and still not fully deciphered. The tablet records commodity allocations or inventories, pairing undeciphered sign clusters with numerical notations: groups of units in the N01 and N30 counting systems. It is one of thousands of such proto-Elamite accounting documents that reveal a sophisticated prehistoric bureaucracy managing goods across a wide region, even before writing had developed into a vehicle for language.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet records several entries of goods or commodities, each paired with a count. One category receives 5 units; another variant of a related category, 4 units; a combined or sub-categorized form of the same, another 4 units; and a final entry, heavily damaged, appears to record quantities in a larger-unit notation (something like 4 tens, 2 fives, and 1 unit — though those last figures are broken and uncertain). The signs naming the actual commodities remain undeciphered, so we know the numbers but not what was being counted. The rest of the first line is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineLine 1: [Signs M305 M387 M131 M309 M032 M096 M263] , [...] Line 2: M036 , 5(N01) Line 3: M387~c × M218 M266~b[?] , 4(N01) Line 4: |M036+1(N30D)| , 4(N01) Line 5: M036[?] , [4(N39B)] [2(N30C)] [1(N30D)]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
M305 M387 M131 M309 M032 M096 M263 , [...] M036 , 5(N01) M387~c x M218 M266~b# , 4(N01) |M036+1(N30D)| , 4(N01) M036#? , 4(N39B)# 2(N30C)# 1(N30D)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 06, 385. 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 (P008165) — 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
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