Position in chronology
MDP 17, 237
About this tablet
A small clay accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100–2900 BCE in the Proto-Elamite script — a writing system that remains largely undeciphered. What can be read are the numbers: a short ledger listing quantities (1, 2, 6, 6, 1, 5) beside sign-groups that identify commodities, people, or institutions we still cannot name. Tablets like this one, excavated by French archaeologists at Susa and now in the Louvre, are among the earliest bookkeeping documents from Iran: we can follow the arithmetic perfectly while the words themselves stay silent.
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. Each line pairs a commodity or account label with a number: one unit against the first entry, two against the second, six against a lost third entry, six again, then a longer damaged line whose figure is broken away, one unit, and finally five. The labels are written in signs no one can yet read, and several entries are chipped or eroded, so only the quantities survive intact.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) […] M228 — 1 (unit) |M036 + 1(N30D)| — 2 (units) […] — 6 (units) |M036 + 1(N30D)| — 6 (units) […] M101 M101 […] M097~h(?) M175 […] — [number lost] […] — 1 (unit) […] M371(?) |M036 + 1(N30D)| — 5 (units) (No further inscribed text is preserved; the remaining surfaces and edges are broken or blank.)
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
x M228 , 1(N01)# |M036+1(N30D)|# , 2(N01) [...] , 6(N01) |M036+1(N30D)| , 6(N01) [...] M101 M101 x M097~h? M175 [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N01) x M371#? |M036+1(N30D)|# , 5(N01)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 237. 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 (P008435) — 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.