Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 5235
About this tablet
A badly broken accounting 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 a list of entries: signs standing for goods or categories, each followed by a tally in the basic counting unit. We cannot name the commodities, but the bookkeeping structure — item, then number — is unmistakable, showing that Susa's administrators were keeping written accounts at the very dawn of writing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a scrap of an ancient ledger. Each surviving line pairs an item — written with signs we can no longer read — with a quantity: one of something, one of something else, two of a third item, the other counts broken away. One entry seems to carry a mark that may flag it as a disbursement, goods handed out rather than received, and a recurring sign appears to sort entries into a category. The beginnings and ends of most lines are lost, so we can only read the skeleton of the account: items and their tallies, from an office at Susa five thousand years ago.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Fragment; proto-Elamite entries, entry-by-entry with counts) [...] M128(?) M096 [...] — [count lost] [...] M250+BA (disbursement marker?) M066-a — 1 (unit) M388 (classifier) [...] — [count lost] [... entry lost ...] — 1 (unit) M510 ... [...] — [count lost] [...] M367(?) (commodity sign) — 2 (units) M388 (classifier) [...] — [count lost]
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
[...] M128#? M096 [...] , [...] [...] M250~ba# M066~a , 1(N01) M388 [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N01) M510 x [...] , [...] [...] M367? , 2(N01) M388 [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 5235. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009333) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.