Position in chronology
MDP 17, 225
About this tablet
A small clay accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written a little after 3100 BCE in the still-undeciphered proto-Elamite script. It is a short ledger: each line names a commodity or recipient with an undeciphered sign group and follows it with a number — mostly single units, once two. Because proto-Elamite has never been read, we can follow the arithmetic but not the vocabulary; the tablet is legible as bookkeeping and mute as language. It is now in the Louvre, still bearing its inventory label Sb 22392.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a short tally sheet. Line by line it lists items — each written with signs we cannot yet read — and sets a quantity beside each one: one unit, one unit, one unit again, and in one case two. Several entries are broken away, so their totals are lost, and the last surviving line names three or four sign-groups together with a number that no longer survives. The rest of the tablet is blank or worn smooth, and the back preserves only faint traces of signs with nothing readable.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse [...] — 1 (unit) [...] M297 — 1 (unit) M218, M223, M218(?) — [...] [...] — 2 (units) |M218~d + M288|, M218 — 1 (unit) M254~a, M372, [...], M206~d — [...] (The remainder of the surface is blank or effaced; the reverse preserves only traces of signs along the left portion, with no legible entries.)
Our translation engine — Opus 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
[...] , 1(N01) x M297 , 1(N01) M218 M223 M218# , [...] [...] , 2(N01)# |M218~d+M288| M218 , 1(N01) M254~a M372 x M206~d , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 225. 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 (P008423) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.