Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 5041
About this tablet
A broken clay accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written a little after 3000 BCE in the still-undeciphered proto-Elamite script. Each line pairs a sign — probably a commodity or an accounting category — with a quantity impressed in the decimal number system: 200, 50, 94, 270. Nobody today can pronounce these words, but the arithmetic is plain: an official was tallying large lots of something, item by item, on a small tablet that was never meant to outlive the transaction. The back was left blank, and the surface is chipped away at both ends, so the totals and the name of whoever was responsible are lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a damaged tally sheet. The readable entries run: one category (the recurring sign M288) with 200 units, then a broken line ending in 50, then a single unit of another category, another 200 for M288, a further 94, one unit of a compound category, another M288 entry whose figure is gone, 270 more, and a final compound entry whose number is broken away. Beginnings and ends of most lines are lost to breakage, and the reverse was left blank, so there is no summary total and no indication of who was being charged or credited.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. M288(?) — 200 [...] 2. [...] — [...] 50 3. M284~m — 1 4. M288 — 200 [...] 5. [...] — [...] 94 6. |M106~2+M288|(?) — 1 7. M288(?) — [...] 8. [...] — 270 9. |M106~2+M288|(?) — [...] (Numerals rendered in the proto-Elamite decimal system: N01 = 1, N14 = 10, N34 = 100. Thus 2(N34) = 200; 5(N14) = 50; 9(N14) 4(N01) = 94; 2(N34) 7(N14) = 270.) Reverse: uninscribed (blank surface; modern museum markings only).
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
M288#? , 2(N34)# [...] [...] , [...] 5(N14) M284~m , 1(N01) M288 , 2(N34) [...] [...] , [...] 9(N14)# 4(N01) |M106~2+M288|? , 1(N01)# M288#? , [...] [...] , 2(N34) 7(N14) |M106~2+M288|# , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 5041. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009284) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.