Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 4768
About this tablet
An administrative tablet from Susa (ancient Elam, in what is now southwest Iran), dating to the Uruk period — roughly 3300–3000 BCE, making it among the earliest written documents ever produced. It is written in proto-Elamite, a script that has never been fully deciphered, so the commodity signs cannot be translated into meaningful words. What is legible are numerical entries — quantities recorded against unreadable commodity classifiers — suggesting this is a standard accounting document tracking goods, animals, or rations under an institutional administration. It is one of thousands of proto-Elamite tablets from Susa that attest to a sophisticated bureaucratic system contemporary with the earliest Sumerian writing in Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet records a set of numerical entries against commodity categories that remain undeciphered. One group totals 5 units of one category; another group also totals 5 units; a third entry records what appears to be 1 large-unit quantity (N14, roughly equivalent to 10 smaller units) of a combined commodity designation, though the tablet is damaged here. The final lines carry a series of mixed numerical values — N30C, N30D, N39C, and N34 — likely a subtotal or grand total line. The commodity names behind each number cannot currently be read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[Heading/rubric: M157~a] M387~i M387~i [+] M054 , 5(N01) [...] , 5(N01) |M305+M136~c| M354 , 1(N14)[?] [...] [...] , [...] 1(N30C) 1(N30D) 1(N39C) 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
M157~a , M387~i M387~i M054 , 5(N01)# [...] , 5(N01) |M305+M136~c| M354 , 1(N14)#? [...] [...] , [...] 1(N30C) 1(N30D) 1(N39C) 1(N34)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 4768. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009206) — 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.