Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 5047
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: a short column of entries, each naming a person, commodity or institution and each followed by the numeral 'one'. Only the numbers can be read with confidence — the words themselves belong to a writing system no one can yet read. Tablets like this are the oldest bureaucratic records from Iran, kept by the same kind of accountants who, a few hundred kilometres away in Mesopotamia, were inventing cuneiform.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragment of a ledger. Each surviving line records one item — the first three entries are unreadable, then two entries headed by the sign M288, each counted as one unit; between them a line beginning with M262 whose number is lost. The seventh line carries a longer string of signs, apparently a compound designation, again totalling one unit. The last line breaks off after a single damaged sign. The tally marks are clear; the words they count are not, since the script has never been deciphered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 1. [...] (illegible sign) — 1 (unit) 2. (illegible sign) — 1 (unit) 3. (illegible sign) — 1 (unit) 4. M288(?) — 1 (unit) 5. M262(?) [...] — [...] 6. M288(?) — 1 (unit) 7. M146~d M388 M218 M223 M218 — 1 (unit) 8. (illegible sign) [...] — [...] (The remaining surfaces of the fragment are blank or too eroded to yield 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
[...] x , 1(N01) x , 1(N01) x , 1(N01)# M288# , 1(N01) M262# [...] , [...] M288# , 1(N01) M146~d M388 M218 M223 M218 , 1(N01) x [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 5047. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009290) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
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.