Position in chronology
MDP 17, 265
About this tablet
A small clay account tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written about 3000 BCE in the still-undeciphered Proto-Elamite script — the local rival to the earliest writing of southern Mesopotamia. A heading names an account or its owner, then a column of entries assigns quantities to individual commodity or recipient signs, ending with a larger figure that is probably the total. We can read its arithmetic but not its words: this is bookkeeping whose numbers survive and whose language does not.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet opens with a two-sign heading — an account name or the person responsible — and then runs down a short list of entries, each pairing a commodity or recipient sign with a number. The first three amounts are broken away. The fourth entry is credited with one unit, the fifth with two, the sixth is lost, and the final line, whose label is destroyed, carries the largest figure: one large-unit sign plus five units. The reverse was left blank. None of the non-numerical signs can be translated, because Proto-Elamite has never been deciphered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse (Heading) M057 M252~r — M269~a(?) — [quantity lost] [M106~a] — [quantity lost] [M009] — [quantity lost] [M206~g] — 1(N01) M102~d — 2(N01) [M309~a] — [quantity lost] [ ... ] — 1(N34) 5(N01) Reverse: uninscribed. (The signs of this Proto-Elamite account are undeciphered; only the numerical notations can be read with confidence. The bracketed entries are lost to surface damage and restored by the editor.)
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
M057 M252~r , M269~a# , [...] [M106~a] , [...] [M009] , [...] [M206~g] , 1(N01) M102~d , 2(N01) [M309~a] , [...] [...] , 1(N34) 5(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 265. 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 (P008463) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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Related sources
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