Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 4755
About this tablet
A small clay accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written a little after 3000 BCE in the Proto-Elamite script — a writing system that is still largely undeciphered. The numerals are perfectly legible: a heading sign, then about a dozen short entries, each pairing a sign or pair of signs with a quantity, followed by a single grand total at the foot. We can read the arithmetic but not the words: we know someone was counting out portions of some commodity against a list of recipients or categories, and we do not know which commodity or whose names. It is one of thousands of such ledgers from the Susa acropolis, the bookkeeping of an administration whose language we have lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet opens with a heading sign, then runs down a list of short accounting entries — one commodity or account name per line, each with its figure: seven units here, three of the smaller measure there, one and four, one and two, and so on, with several figures lost where the clay is broken. Near the bottom an entry is damaged past reading, and the account closes with a single grand total, one large unit. The back of the tablet was left blank. What the signs stand for — the goods, the people, the institution — remains unknown; only the numbers still speak.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) M157 (heading sign) M144 M388 — 7(N01) |M288+1(N39B)| — 1(N01) 2(N39B) [...] M288 — 3(N39B) M382~f — 3(N01) M288 — 1(N39B) [...] M288 — 1(N01) 4(N39B) M305 M305 M001 — 1(N01) [...] M288 — 1(N39B) M209~d(?) M001 — 1(N01) M288 — 1(N01) [...] M249~c — 2(N39B) [...] — [...] 2(N01)(?) 2(N39B) (total) 1(N34) (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
M157 , M144 M388 , 7(N01) |M288+1(N39B)| , 1(N01) 2(N39B) [...] M288 , 3(N39B) M382~f , 3(N01) M288 , 1(N39B) [...] M288 , 1(N01) 4(N39B) M305 M305 M001 , 1(N01) [...] M288 , 1(N39B) M209~d# M001 , 1(N01) M288 , 1(N01) [...] M249~c , 2(N39B) [...] , [...] 2(N01)# 2(N39B) 1(N34)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 4755. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009193) — 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.