Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 4768
About this tablet
A small clay accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written a little after 3100 BCE in the still-undeciphered Proto-Elamite script — the local writing system that grew up alongside Mesopotamian proto-cuneiform. It records quantities of something (five and five units, then ten, then a set of small capacity measures) filed under a heading sign and a couple of commodity or institutional markers whose meanings remain unknown. Because Proto-Elamite has never been fully read, we can follow the arithmetic perfectly while the nouns stay silent. The tablet is pierced through, which suggests it may have hung as a label or been strung with others in a file.
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 lists entries: one category — marked twice by the same sign plus a second classifier — is credited with five units; a second, now broken, line also carries five units. A further entry, headed by a compound sign followed by another classifier, is assigned ten units, with the rest of the line lost. The next line is broken away except for its measures: three small capacity quantities. A final figure of one large unit closes the account. The reverse is blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) M157~a (heading sign) — [no quantity] M387~i M387~i M054 — 5 (units, N01) [...] — 5 (units, N01) |M305+M136~c| M354 — 1 (N14, i.e. ten units) [...] [...] — [...] 1 (N30C) 1 (N30D) 1 (N39C) 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~a , M387~i M387~i M054 , 5(N01)# [...] , 5(N01) |M305+M136~c| M354 , 1(N14)#? [...] [...] , [...] 1(N30C) 1(N30D) 1(N39C) 1(N34)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 4768. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009206) — 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.