Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 5196
About this tablet
A small clay accounting tablet from Susa in south-western Iran, written a little over five thousand years ago in the proto-Elamite script — a system that remains largely undeciphered. Only a narrow column at the top-left of the face is inscribed: a heading sign, then three or four entries, each pairing a group of commodity or personal signs with a number (13, perhaps 13 again, 1, and 31). Even without knowing what is being counted, the structure is unmistakably a ledger: goods or people tallied under named headings, the kind of record that ran the storerooms and workshops of early Susa.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet opens with a heading sign marking the type of record. Then come the entries: one line of several signs — two of them damaged beyond reading — credited with 13 units; a second line, again a cluster of signs, with what appears to be 13 units; a third with a single unit; and a final line with 31 units. Most of the face was left blank, and the reverse carries nothing legible. What the counted commodity was, we cannot say — the proto-Elamite script has never been fully read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse, column i) M157 — (heading sign; document classifier) M325~d, M388, M314, [two illegible signs], M096, M297 — 1(N14) 3(N01) = 13 M377~e, M347(?), M371 — [1(N14)?] 3(N01) = [13?] M254~c, M297 — 1(N01) = 1 M297 — 3(N14) 1(N01) = 31 (The remainder of the obverse face is uninscribed; the reverse is blank/eroded and carries no legible signs. The edges bear no writing beyond the modern museum number Sb 15363.)
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
M157 , M325~d M388 M314 x x M096 M297 , 1(N14) 3(N01) M377~e M347? M371 , [1(N14)?] 3(N01) M254~c M297 , 1(N01) M297 , 3(N14) 1(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 5196. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009296) — 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.