Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 5239
About this tablet
An administrative account tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100 BCE in one of the world's earliest — and still largely undeciphered — writing systems. A bookkeeper recorded quantities of goods, mixing whole units (twelve of something in line 3) with fractional measures, each entry tagged with signs that likely name commodities or the people responsible for them. Tablets like this show that writing at Susa, as at Uruk, was born not for literature but for accounting; because the sign values are lost, we can read the numbers but not what was being counted.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a fragmentary ledger. The first surviving entry records one and a fraction of some measured good, but the item's name is broken away. The second entry begins with a category sign whose quantity is lost. The third entry lists twelve units of a commodity identified by a cluster of signs we can no longer read. The fourth records a bit over one unit — fractional measures — of what seems to be the same or a related commodity. The reverse carries no ancient writing, only modern museum inventory numbers. In short: someone's accounts of measured goods, with the amounts legible but the products themselves lost to time.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineobverse (line 1) [...] — 1(N24) 1(N30d) [fractional measures] (line 2) M131~e [...] — [quantity lost] (line 3) [...] M304, M388, M285~b, M288 — 1(N14) 2(N01) [= 12 units in the sexagesimal system] (line 4) [...] M388(?), M285~c(?), M288 — 1(N39b) 1(N24) [fractional measures] (The signs designated by M-numbers are proto-cuneiform/proto-Elamite graphemes without established phonetic readings; they mark commodities, categories, or account-holders whose identity cannot yet be translated. The reverse is uninscribed apart from modern museum markings.)
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
[...] , 1(N24) 1(N30D) M131~e# [...] , [...] [...] M304 M388 M285~b M288 , 1(N14) 2(N01)# [...] M388#? M285~c#? M288 , 1(N39B)# 1(N24)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 5239. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009337) — 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.