Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 4793
About this tablet
A small clay account tablet from Susa in southwestern Iran, written around 3100–2900 BCE in the proto-Elamite script — a writing system that is still largely undeciphered. It records a short list of commodity entries, each headed by a sign or sign-group and followed by a quantity in one of the proto-Elamite numerical systems, closed by a single total. Even though we cannot read the words, the structure is transparently that of a ledger: goods on the left, amounts on the right, a sum at the end. It is a piece of the earliest bureaucracy of the Iranian plateau, now in the Louvre.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The opening line and heading are broken and unreadable. What survives is a short ledger: one entry of a commodity marked M387 with 1 unit; another, a variant of the same sign, also 1 unit; and a third entry combining M387 with two further signs, at 3 units plus 1 of a smaller measure. Beneath these stands a single figure of 1 (in the larger numeral system), evidently the total. The commodity names themselves cannot be read — the proto-Elamite script has never been deciphered — so only the arithmetic shape of the account comes through.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 1. [M327+M342](?) — 2. M157~a[…] (one unread sign) […] , […] 3. […] M387 (one unread sign) , 1(N39B) 4. M387~ef (one unread sign) , 1(N39B) 5. M387 M016 M288 , 3(N39B) 1(N24) 6. 1(N34) (The head of the account is broken away; the surviving entries pair an undeciphered commodity/category sign with a numeral, and the last line stands alone as a summation.)
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
|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-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.