Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 5223
About this tablet
A small clay accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100–2900 BCE in the proto-Elamite script — a writing system that has never been deciphered. We can read the numbers, which follow known counting systems, but the signs naming the goods or people involved remain a mystery. It is a receipt or ledger entry: someone was tracking quantities of a commodity, closing with what looks like a total. Tablets like this are among humanity's earliest bookkeeping, from a script still waiting to be cracked.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a badly damaged account sheet. At the top stands a classifier sign — something like a document heading — whose meaning we no longer know. Below it, a series of entries pairs undeciphered commodity signs with quantities: one entry records one unit plus one of a related measure; another, further down, records one unit, one of a variant measure, and two small fractional units. The final line carries a single large-unit numeral, probably the total of the account. Most of the entries are broken away, and the goods being counted cannot be identified.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) (rubric/heading:) M157~a (line 1:) [sign illegible] [...] (line 2:) [...] M384~d M297 [...] (undeciphered commodity entry) (line 3:) [...] — 1(N14) 1(N14@b) (i.e. one unit of the N14 series and one of its derived @b series) (line 4:) [sign illegible] [...] — [...] (line 5:) [...] — 1(N24) 1(N24@b) 2(N30D@b) (one N24 unit, one N24@b unit, two N30D@b fractional units) (final entry / total:) 1(N34) (one large-unit numeral) (remainder of tablet broken or uninscribed)
Our translation engine — Fable 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~a , x , [...] [...] M384~d M297 , [...] [...] , 1(N14) 1(N14@b) x [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N24) 1(N24@b) 2(N30D@b) 1(N34)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 5223. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009322) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.