Position in chronology
MDP 17, 345
About this tablet
A broken fragment of a proto-Elamite accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3000 BCE in a script that has never been deciphered. Each surviving entry pairs a short string of signs — probably naming a person, institution, or commodity — with a small number (1, 5, 2, 2). It is the bookkeeping of one of the world's first urban economies, but we can count what was tallied without knowing what it was.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a list of entries, each a few signs followed by a count: one of something, then five, then two, then two again, with further entries too damaged to read. The signs that would tell us who or what was being counted belong to the undeciphered proto-Elamite script, so the tablet reads today as a column of quantities whose labels are lost to us. The edges and the rest of the surface are broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse, fragmentary proto-Elamite account) [...] M009 M318 M371 M321 : 1 [...] [...] M371 M376 : 5 M509 x [...] : [...] [...] : 2 x [...] : [...] [...] M376 : 2 M099 M136(?) [...] : [...] x x x : [...] (The signs M009, M318, M371, M321, M376, M509, M099, M136 are undeciphered proto-Elamite signs; only the numerals — 1, 5, 2, 2 — can be read with meaning. The rest of the tablet is broken.)
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] M009 M318~a2 M371 M321 , 1(N01)# [...] [...] M371 M376 , 5(N01) M509 x [...] , [...] [...] , 2(N01)# x [...] , [...] [...] M376 , 2(N01) M099 M136#? [...] , [...] x x x , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 17, 345. 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 (P008543) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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