Position in chronology
SE 124
About this tablet
A small accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100 BCE in the proto-Elamite script — a writing system that remains largely undeciphered. A bookkeeper tallied five or six categories of goods or personnel, each marked by a sign we can no longer read, and summed them on the back: the quantities 24, 11, 46, 12 and 6 add up exactly to the 99 recorded as the total. Even though we cannot name what was being counted, the arithmetic still works after five thousand years — vivid proof of a functioning bureaucracy at the 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 ledger. The heading entry is damaged and its quantity is lost, but the itemized lines survive: 24 units of one commodity, 11 of another, 46 of a third, 12 of a fourth, and 6 of a fifth — each identified by a category sign whose meaning is no longer known. On the back, the accountant wrote the grand total under the same heading sign as the first entry: 99 units, which is exactly the sum of the surviving line items. In modern terms: an inventory sheet with five line entries and a checked total at the bottom.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [Entry headed by] M207 [— quantity broken], M054 — 24 (2 × N14, 4 × N01), M373 — 11 (1 × N14, 1 × N01), M072 — 46 (4 × N14, 6 × N01), M046 — 12 (1 × N14, 2 × N01), M370 — 6 (6 × N01). (reverse) M207 — 99 (9 × N14, 9 × N01) [total].
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
M207# , M054# , 2(N14) 4(N01) M373# , 1(N14) 1(N01) M072 , 4(N14) 6(N01) M046 , 1(N14) 2(N01) M370 , 6(N01)# M207# , 9(N14) 9(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — SE 124. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Couvent Saint-Etienne, Jerusalem (P009441) — 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.