Position in chronology
MDP 17, 249
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written a little after 3000 BCE in the proto-Elamite script — a writing system that has never been deciphered. What survives is clearly an account: a column of short entries, each pairing one or two commodity or personal signs with a small quantity, drawn from the numerical systems that proto-Elamite scribes used for grain, animals and rationed goods. Even without being able to read the words, we can see the shape of the bookkeeping: someone in a Susa storeroom was tallying separate disbursements, mostly of one unit each. The tablet is now in four fragments in the Louvre.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The top of the tablet is gone. What remains is a running list of small allocations: one entry of two units in one measure; another of a single large unit; then a string of items each marked with a single small unit — one, one, one — and two entries counted with a different sign, one of them combining two measures at once. Several entries are broken off before their figures. The commodity names, written in the undeciphered proto-Elamite script, cannot be read; only the numbers and the layout of the account survive. The lower part of the tablet and the reverse are lost or illegible.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, upper portion broken) [...] [...] — 2 (N39B) M244, [...] — [broken] [...] M010~2 — 1 (N14) M388(?) M262 M259 M218 — 1 (N30C) [...] M096 — 1 (N39B) M048~d M288 — 1 (N24) 1 (N30C) M057~b1 — [broken] [...] M218 M288 — 1 (N30C) M024 M024 M288 — 1 (N30C) [...] M371 M288 — 1 (N30C) M386~a M288 — 1 (N24) M155 — [broken] [...] — [broken] (The remainder of the tablet, including the lower obverse and the reverse, is broken away or too damaged to read.)
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] , x , 2(N39B)# M244# x , [...] x M010~2# , 1(N14) M388#? M262 M259 M218 , 1(N30C) [...] x M096 , 1(N39B) M048~d M288 , 1(N24) 1(N30C) M057~b1 , [...] x M218 M288 , 1(N30C) M024 M024 M288 , 1(N30C) x M371 M288 , 1(N30C) M386~a M288 , 1(N24) M155 , [...] [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 249. 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 (P008447) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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