Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 4793
About this tablet
A proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (modern southwest Iran), dated to the late Uruk period, roughly 3200–2900 BCE — among the very earliest writing systems in human history. Like most proto-Elamite documents, it records commodities and their quantities in a columnar accounting format, but the signs remain undeciphered: we can read the numbers but not the words. The tablet is held in the Louvre and bears two museum numbers, suggesting it was catalogued at different points. It is a small piece of the vast bureaucratic apparatus that ran the world's first cities, and a reminder that much of the earliest writing is still unreadable.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet lists several entries of an unidentified commodity or commodities — the signs naming what is being counted have not yet been deciphered. The first line is broken. Subsequent entries record one unit each of something (M387 and its variant M387~ef), and then a combined entry pairing M387 with two further signs totalling three small units and one larger unit. The final line gives an overall total of one large numerical unit (N34). The upper portion of the tablet is damaged and several signs are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[(Sign M327+M342), broken] , [M157~a] x [...] , [...] [...] M387(?) x , 1(N39B) M387~ef x , 1(N39B) M387 M016 M288 , 3(N39B) 1(N24) 1(N34)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
|M327+M342|#? , M157~a# x [...] , [...] [...] M387# x , 1(N39B)# M387~ef# x , 1(N39B) M387# M016 M288 , 3(N39B) 1(N24) 1(N34)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 4793. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009230) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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Related sources
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.