Position in chronology
RA 050, 202 13
About this tablet
One of the world's oldest accounting documents, from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3300–3000 BCE at the very dawn of writing. It is a numerical tablet: a scribe pressed round and wedge-shaped tokens of a counting system into wet clay to record quantities — mostly small fractional measures, probably of a grain product — each paired with a sign for what was being counted. Most of those commodity signs are too worn or too archaic to decipher, but the bookkeeping structure itself is perfectly clear, a snapshot of administration before language could be fully written down.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a ledger with nine surviving entries. The first lines record larger amounts — eight units, eight units, and one unit of something whose name is now unreadable. Then come a series of small fractional amounts: one small measure each across five separate entries, plus one entry of two grain-measures. The last legible entry pairs a single small measure with a recurring but still undeciphered commodity sign, most likely a grain product. The item names are largely lost to erosion; only the numbers survive intact.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) [...] : 8 (N01 units) [illegible sign] : 8 (N01 units) [illegible sign] : 1 (N01 unit) [illegible sign] : 1 (N30C fraction) [illegible sign] : 1 (N30C fraction) [...] [illegible sign] : 2 (N39B grain-measures) [illegible sign] : 1 (N30C fraction) [illegible sign] : 1 (N30C fraction) M367 (undeciphered commodity sign) : 1 (N30C fraction)
Our translation engine — Fable 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
[...] , 8(N01) x , 8(N01)# x , 1(N01) x , 1(N30C) x , 1(N30C) [...] x , 2(N39B) x , 1(N30C) x , 1(N30C) M367#? , 1(N30C)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — RA 050, 202 13. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009492) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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Related sources
One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.