Position in chronology
MDP 17, 235
About this tablet
A small clay accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written in the still-undeciphered Proto-Elamite script around 3100–2900 BCE. It records three or more separate allotments — three units, two units, three units — each attached to a different combination of commodity or household signs. Because Proto-Elamite cannot yet be read, we know the arithmetic but not the goods: this is a receipt whose numbers survive and whose words do not. It comes from the same early bookkeeping tradition that produced the earliest writing in Mesopotamia, and it shows administrators at Susa keeping their own parallel accounts.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is a short ledger. The opening line gives a heading built on the signs M305+M288 with M388, but the rest of that line is broken away. Then come the entries: one group of goods marked M297, M066 and M348 is credited with three units; a line beginning with M066 is lost; another entry records two units; a fuller heading — M048~k, M080~c, M297, M066, M348 — has lost its figure; and a final surviving line gives three units. The edges are blank and the reverse was never inscribed, apart from the modern museum numbers painted on it.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineobverse 1. [...] |M305+M288| M388 [...] — [broken] 2. [...] M297 M066 M348 — 3 (N₀₁) 3. M066 [...] — [broken] 4. [...] — 2 (N₀₁) 5. M048~k M080~c M297 M066 M348 — [broken] 6. [...] — 3 (N₀₁) (Left, right, top and bottom edges: no inscribed signs preserved; the edges carry only impressions and surface damage.) reverse (Uninscribed; the surface bears only the modern museum markings "235" and "Sb 22401".)
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
[...] |M305+M288|# M388 [...] , [...] [...] M297 M066 M348 , 3(N01) M066# [...] , [...] [...] , 2(N01) M048~k M080~c M297 M066 M348# , [...] [...] , 3(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 235. 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 (P008433) — 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.