Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 0249
About this tablet
A Proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (southwestern Iran), dating to the late fourth or early third millennium BCE — one of the world's earliest writing traditions, predating fully deciphered script. The tablet records several entries pairing sign-groups (commodity or category identifiers whose precise meanings remain undeciphered) with numerical quantities, and closes with a larger total figure. It is part of the vast corpus of Proto-Elamite accounting documents that show a complex, literate bureaucracy managing goods across a wide region — yet, unlike Sumerian cuneiform, Proto-Elamite script has never been fully deciphered, so the exact commodities and actors named here remain unknown. Its survival in the Louvre gives scholars a rare physical window into one of humanity's earliest experiments in writing and record-keeping.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet lists several categories of goods or transactions, each paired with a small quantity (2 or 3 units of a lower denomination), with some entries only partially preserved. One line records a quantity of 1(N39B), and another entry closes without a surviving numeral. The tablet ends with a summary or total line giving a larger value: 1 (N14) plus 4 (N39B) — equivalent to a higher combined count. The rest of the signs identifying what was being counted, and who was responsible, cannot yet be read: the script they belong to has never been deciphered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] M110 M250~ba M218 , 3(N39B) [...] M218 , 2(N39B) M068~c |M296+M296| M066 [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N39B) M254~a M301 |M296+M296| M057 , [...] [...] M352~n M218 |M106+M288| M066 , 2(N39B) [...] , [...] 1(N39B) M318~a M066 M320 M390 M285~c [...] , [...] M063~d M001~b , 1(N14) 4(N39B)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , [...] M110 M250~ba M218 , 3(N39B) [...] M218# , 2(N39B) M068~c |M296+M296| M066 [...] , [...] [...] , [...] 1(N39B) M254~a M301# |M296+M296| M057# , [...] [...] M352~n M218 |M106+M288| M066 , 2(N39B)# [...] , [...] 1(N39B) M318~a M066 M320 M390 M285~c [...] , [...] M063~d M001~b , 1(N14) 4(N39B)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 0249. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009177) — 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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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.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.