Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 0340
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written a little after 3000 BCE in the Proto-Elamite script — one of the world's earliest writing systems, and one still largely undeciphered. What survives is an account: several short entries, each naming a commodity or account-holder with an undeciphered sign, followed by numbers impressed into the clay with the end of a round stylus. Even without being able to read the words, we can see the shape of the bookkeeping — separate line items, each with its own quantity, and larger round impressions marking the bigger figures. It is administrative paperwork from a city whose language we cannot yet recover.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a damaged ledger, and only fragments of each line survive. The first entry, whose heading is broken away, is credited with 2 large units. The second lists 1 unit of ten plus 3 single units. A third line preserves only its heading sign before the numbers break off. A fourth entry records 1 unit together with a set of smaller measures — three of one kind, two of another, one of a third — most likely a capacity or ration figure. The last line preserves nothing but a partial 6 of ten-units floating between two breaks. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineobverse 1. [...] M377, M010~1, M288 — 2(N45) [...] 2. [...] M324~a, M288 — 1(N14) 3(N01) 3. [...] x, M288 — [...] 4. [...] M288 — 1(N01) 3(N39B) 2(N30C) 1(N30D) 5. [...] — [...] 6(N14) [...] (All line beginnings, and the ends of lines 1, 3 and 5, are lost in the breaks. The signs M377, M010~1, M324~a and M288 are undeciphered Proto-Elamite graphemes; the parenthesised N-signs are numerical/metrological impressions and are given in their conventional notation, since the systems to which N45, N39B, N30C and N30D belong are not securely convertible into modern units.)
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
[...] M377# M010~1# M288 , 2(N45) [...] [...] M324~a M288 , 1(N14) 3(N01) x M288# , [...] [...] M288# , 1(N01) 3(N39B) 2(N30C) 1(N30D) [...] , [...] 6(N14)# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 0340. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009186) — 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.