Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 5037
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100–2900 BCE in the still-undeciphered Proto-Elamite script. It is an account: each line names a commodity or a recipient with an untranslatable sign, followed by a quantity impressed with a round or wedge-shaped stylus. Because Proto-Elamite words cannot yet be read, we can follow the arithmetic but not the vocabulary — we know someone was counting three of one thing, five of another, and a mixed measure at the end, but not what those things were. Tablets like this one, excavated at Susa and now in the Louvre, are among the earliest bookkeeping documents ever made.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving entries of this ledger read, in order: an item (its name partly broken away) — 3 units; another item marked twice with the same sign — 5 units; a third entry whose quantity is lost; an unnamed item — 1 unit; a compound heading followed by a broken sign — 1 unit; a further entry — 2 units, with the rest of the line broken; and finally one more commodity — 2 units plus a smaller measure and two of a still smaller one. The signs naming the goods belong to the undeciphered Proto-Elamite writing system, so only the numbers can be read with confidence. Everything else on the fragment is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] M371 M387 M009 M264~a₁ — 3 (N01) [...] M066 M066 |M036 + 1(N30D)| — 5 (N01) M146 [...] — [...] [...] — 1 (N01) |M305 + M320| [...] M260~1 — 1 (N01) |M036 + 1(N30D)| — 2 (N01) [...] M297 — 2 (N01), 1 (N39B), 2 (N30C) (No further text is preserved; the remaining faces of the fragment carry no legible signs.)
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
[...] M371 M387 M009 M264~a1 , 3(N01)# [...] M066# M066 |M036+1(N30D)| , 5(N01) M146 [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N01) |M305+M320| [...] M260~1 , 1(N01) |M036+1(N30D)| , 2(N01)#? [...] M297# , 2(N01) 1(N39B) 2(N30C)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 5037. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009280) — 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.