Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 5206
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100–2900 BCE in the proto-Elamite script — a writing system that remains largely undeciphered. What survives is an accounting record: a series of entries pairing commodity or personal signs with numerals (one unit here, ten there, four in another line). The reverse was left blank, which is typical of these short administrative notes. Even though we cannot read the words, the structure is unmistakable — someone in a Susa storehouse was keeping track of goods, entry by entry.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a damaged ledger fragment. The opening entries are lost. One surviving line records a single unit; another, after several commodity signs, records ten; a further line records four. Two other entries preserve only sign groups with their totals broken away. The back of the tablet was never written on. Because the proto-Elamite script has not been deciphered, we can read the numbers but not the names of the goods or people they belong to.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 1. [ ... ] , 2. [ ... ] , 1(N01) — one unit (sign damaged) 3. (one illegible sign) , [ ... ] 4. [ ... ] M347 M371 |M036+1(N30D)| , 1(N14@b) — one N14 unit (= 10) 5. [ ... ] M305 M388 M285~s M371 M210~g(?) [ ... ] , [ ... ] 6. [ ... ] , 4(N1@b) — four units 7. M176~b(?) [ ... ] , [ ... ] (reverse: uninscribed; bears only the modern museum markings Sb 15372 / 5206)
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
[...] , [...] , 1(N01)# x , [...] [...] M347 M371 |M036+1(N30D)| , 1(N14@b) [...] M305 M388 M285~s M371 M210~g#? [...] , [...] [...] , 4(N1@b) M176~b# [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 5206. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009306) — 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.