Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 4776
About this tablet
A small clay accounting tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written a little over five thousand years ago in Proto-Elamite — a script that remains largely undeciphered. What can be read with confidence are the numbers: a column of short entries, each headed by one or two signs and each assigned the same quantity, two units. It is a ledger of some kind, probably a distribution or receipt of identical allotments to several named people, households, or categories. The words are lost to us, but the arithmetic still works: this is the bookkeeping of an early bureaucratic state, preserved in the Louvre.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A short tally sheet, badly cracked. Under a single heading, one entry after another is credited with the same amount — two units each: two for the first item, two for the second, two for the third, and so on down the list, with several entries broken away in the middle. The last preserved line simply reads 'two.' The back of the tablet is blank. What exactly was being counted is not written on any surviving part of the tablet, and the signs that would have named the recipients or the goods cannot be read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) 1. M157 — (heading) 2. M005~a M213~b M346 — 2 (units) 3. M005~a (x) [...] — [2 (units)] 4. [...] — 2 (units) 5. M249~c M001 — 2 (units) 6. M131 M388 [...] — 2 (units) 7. [...] M388 M260~1 M260~1 — 2 (units) 8. M075~ab [...] (remainder of line lost) 9. [M346] — [...] 2 (units) 10. 2 (units) (Reverse: uninscribed / surface blank and broken) Note: the counted commodity is not named in any surviving line; all preserved quantities are written with the numeral sign N01, twice in each entry, in the decimal-type system used for discrete counted objects.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
M157 , M005~a# M213~b M346 , 2(N01) M005~a x [...] , [2(N01)] [...] , 2(N01) M249~c M001 , 2(N01) M131# M388# [...] , 2(N01) [...] M388 M260~1 M260~1 , 2(N01) M075~ab [...] [M346] , [...] 2(N01) 2(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 4776. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009213) — 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.