Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 4756
About this tablet
A small administrative accounting tablet from ancient Susa (in what is now southwestern Iran), dating to the Uruk period, roughly 3300–3000 BCE. Written in proto-Elamite — one of the world's earliest writing systems, still largely undeciphered — it records a list of commodity entries, each followed by a numeral, with a heading sign and a closing total line. Tablets like this are the bureaucratic backbone of early urban economies: scribes tracking quantities of goods, animals, or rations through a system of signs whose full meaning we have not yet recovered. This fragment survives in several pieces, now held at the Louvre, and illustrates how early accountancy predates readable language.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet opens with a heading or label whose meaning is unknown. What follows is a list of entries — each naming one or more commodity signs together with a quantity of 1 unit (N39B), repeated across at least six lines. Several signs and a few entries are too damaged to read. The final legible line records a quantity of 1 (N01) plus 4 (N39B) against two signs that may represent a category label or subtotal. A closing sign ends the document. In modern terms: a short itemized list, probably of goods or commodities, each present in single units, with a running or summary total at the bottom — the rest is too broken to read with certainty.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineM157~a [heading/rubric — document type or institutional marker, meaning unknown] M041~d(?) M319 M124 x |M218+M288| M066 |M029~l+1(N08A)| , [...] [x] M386~a M242~b(?) M066 , 1(N39B) M259 M260~1 M096 , 1(N39B) M124(?) M371 [...] , [...] [x] , 1(N39B) [x] M230(?) [...] , 1(N39B) [x] [x] , 1(N39B) |M029~l+1(N08A)| M297 , 1(N01) 4(N39B) |M305+M342| [total line or closing sign]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
M157~a , M041~d#? M319 M124 x |M218+M288| M066 |M029~l+1(N08A)| , [...] x M386~a M242~b#? M066 , 1(N39B) M259 M260~1 M096 , 1(N39B) M124#? M371 [...] , [...] x , 1(N39B) x M230#? [...] , 1(N39B) x x , 1(N39B) |M029~l+1(N08A)| M297 , 1(N01) 4(N39B) |M305+M342|#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 4756. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009194) — 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.