Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 4848
About this tablet
A small proto-Elamite accounting tablet from Susa, in southwestern Iran, written a little over five thousand years ago — around 3100–2900 BCE. It is a ledger: a column of sign-groups (commodities, or the people or institutions responsible for them) each followed by a small number, mostly ones and twos, marked with the basic unit sign N01. Proto-Elamite is still an undeciphered script, so the numbers are readable but the words are not; we can see the shape of the bookkeeping without knowing what was being counted. The tablet is broken on all sides, and the numbering on the left edge is a modern museum mark, not ancient writing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a broken ledger. The first entry is lost. Then: one unit against the sign-group M029~b; two units against M369~a; one against M072; four against an entry whose heading has broken away; one against the group M029~b–M388–M074~f. The doubled sign M377 follows, but its figure is gone. Three more single-unit entries come next — one for a lost heading, one for M032, one for M223 — and the last legible line pairs the signs M001 and M139 with a number that no longer survives. Everything after that is broken off.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) […] — [broken] M029~b — 1(N01) M369~a — 2(N01) M072 — 1(N01) […] — 4(N01) M029~b M388 M074~f — 1(N01) |M377+M377| — [broken] […] — 1(N01) M032 — 1(N01) M223 — 1(N01) (…) M001 M139 — [broken] (The remainder of the surface is lost; no further entries are legible.)
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 , [...] M029~b# , 1(N01) M369~a , 2(N01) M072 , 1(N01) [...] , 4(N01)# M029~b M388 M074~f , 1(N01) |M377+M377| , [...] [...] , 1(N01)# M032# , 1(N01)# M223 , 1(N01) x M001 M139 , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 4848. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009253) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.