Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 0284
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from Susa (ancient Elam, southwestern Iran), dating to the Uruk period — roughly 3300–3100 BCE, among the very earliest writing in human history. It records numerical entries against commodity or category signs whose precise meanings remain undeciphered, a common format for early proto-Elamite and proto-cuneiform accounting documents. The tablet has broken into several pieces and its surface is significantly eroded, making full reading impossible. It belongs to the vast archive of early bureaucratic records that reveal how the first cities managed goods, labor, and redistribution before fully developed writing existed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet lists several entries, each pairing one or more undeciphered commodity or category signs with a small number — mostly 1 or 2 units. One entry records '1 unit and 3 [of something]'; others record single or double units of goods whose nature we cannot yet identify. Several lines are too damaged or broken to read at all. What survives is the bare skeleton of an ancient accounting record: a scribe tallying quantities of things, using signs whose meaning has not yet been recovered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , 1(N01) 3(N39B)[?] [x] , 1(N01) [x] , 2(N01) M380 |M218+M288| [...] [x] , 1(N01) [...] [...] M288[?] , 2(N01) |M218+M288| M004 M218 , 2(N01) [x] [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] , 1(N01)# 3(N39B)# x , 1(N01) x , 2(N01) M380 |M218+M288| [...] x , 1(N01) [...] [...] M288#? , 2(N01) |M218+M288| M004 M218 , 2(N01) x [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 0284. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009179) — 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.
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.