Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 0284
About this tablet
A small clay accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100–3000 BCE in the still-undeciphered proto-Elamite script. Each line pairs a sign or group of signs — naming a commodity, a person, or an institution — with a number impressed as round or wedge-shaped marks, in the standard ledger layout of the world's earliest bureaucracies. Because proto-Elamite has never been fully cracked, we can read the quantities with confidence but not the things being counted. The reverse was left blank, which is normal: these one-sided memoranda recorded a single delivery or allotment and were not meant to last.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a short ledger. The first surviving entry gives a quantity of one unit plus three measures of some commodity, though both numbers are damaged. Two more entries follow, one unit and then two units, but their headings are broken away. A fourth line lists several signs together — including the recurring M218+M288 group — against one unit, and a fifth records two units of something whose name is lost. The sixth line again names the M218+M288 group with two further signs and assigns two units to it. The last line is too damaged to read at all, and the back of the tablet was never written on.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [...] — 1(N01)(?) 3(N39B)(?) 2. [...] — 1(N01) 3. [...] — 2(N01) 4. M380, |M218+M288|, [...] [...] — 1(N01) [...] 5. [...] M288(?) — 2(N01) 6. |M218+M288|, M004, M218 — 2(N01) 7. [...] [...] — [...] (Reverse: uninscribed)
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)# 3(N39B)# x , 1(N01) x , 2(N01) M380 |M218+M288| [...] x , 1(N01) [...] [...] M288#? , 2(N01) |M218+M288| M004 M218 , 2(N01) x [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 0284. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009179) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.