Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 4760
About this tablet
A small clay account tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written more than five thousand years ago in the proto-Elamite script — a writing system that has never been fully deciphered. What can be read with certainty are the numbers: quantities punched into the clay with a round stylus, entered against a handful of sign-labels that presumably name commodities, officials, or households. It is bookkeeping from the very dawn of writing, produced by an administrator who could record amounts precisely even though we can no longer say what was being counted.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is a short ledger. Against one label (badly damaged at the start) stands a quantity of seventy units; the next entry, under the same heading sign, records one large unit plus forty-five; a third label carries ten units, with the rest of the line broken away. A further, lost entry has a single unit. Then a heading with two more signs takes eighty units, and the closing line — under the recurring M288 sign — totals one hundred and eleven units. The reverse was left blank apart from a stray impression. What the units measure, and who the labels name, remain unknown.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [… …] (two signs, illegible) — M288: 7(N14) [ … ] 2. M288(?): 1(N45) 4(N14) 5(N01) 3. M010~3: 1(N14) [ … ] 4. [ … ]: 1(N01)(?) 5. M005~a(?) |M305+X|: 8(N14) 6. M288: 1(N34) 1(N14) 1(N01) (Reverse: essentially uninscribed; a single round impression and one short stroke are visible near the left edge, with no readable entry.)
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 x M288 , 7(N14) [...] M288# , 1(N45) 4(N14) 5(N01) M010~3 , 1(N14) [...] [...] , 1(N01)# M005~a#? |M305+X| , 8(N14) M288 , 1(N34) 1(N14) 1(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 4760. 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 (P009198) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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