Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 5217
About this tablet
A broken clay account tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100–2900 BCE in the still-undeciphered proto-Elamite script. Each surviving line pairs a sign or group of signs — the name of a commodity, an official, or a household — with a quantity recorded in circular and wedge-shaped numerals impressed into the clay. Because proto-Elamite words cannot yet be read, we can follow the arithmetic but not the vocabulary: this is bookkeeping whose numbers survive while its language does not. It is one of thousands of such fragments from the Susa acropolis, now in the Louvre.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a column of entries, each one a heading followed by a figure: one unit against a lost heading; then a group of four signs whose quantity is broken away; forty-two against another lost heading; two against a doubtful sign; four against a partly preserved pair of signs; a further entry beginning with M388 whose number is gone; three units against a lost heading; another entry opening with M180, again without its figure; and finally forty-three plus two units of a second, smaller measure. The signs themselves cannot be read — proto-Elamite remains undeciphered — and the rest of the tablet is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] — 1 (unit) M338~c M024 M371 M010 — [...] [...] — 4 (tens) 2 (units) M136~c(?) — 2 (units) [...] M371 M010 — 4 (units) M388 [...] — [...] [...] — 3 (units) M180 [...] — [...] [...] — 4 (tens) 3 (units) 2 (N39B-units) (No further inscribed text is preserved; the remainder of the surface is broken away or effaced.)
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) M338~c# M024# M371# M010# , [...] [...] , 4(N14)# 2(N01) M136~c#? , 2(N01)# [...] M371 M010# , 4(N01) M388 [...] , [...] [...] , 3(N01) M180 [...] , [...] [...] , 4(N14)# 3(N01) 2(N39B)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 5217. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009317) — 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.