Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 5037
About this tablet
A small proto-Elamite administrative tablet from ancient Susa (modern Shush, southwest Iran), dating to roughly 3100–2900 BCE — among the earliest writing in the world. It records quantities of commodities or goods under a series of as-yet undeciphered category signs, typical of the proto-Elamite accounting system. The tablet is badly broken into several fragments, which the museum has reassembled, and most of the sign values cannot yet be read as words in any known language. Proto-Elamite writing remains largely undeciphered, making tablets like this a frontier of ongoing scholarly research.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a tally or inventory record. Several categories of goods — their exact names still unknown to us — are listed with numerical counts: one group totalling 3 units, another 5, individual items of 1 each, one entry of 2 (possibly uncertain), and a final entry recording a quantity of 2 plus a fractional or sub-unit count. The rest of the text is too broken or too damaged to read. The precise commodities and who they belonged to remain unresolved.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] M371 M387 M009 M264~a , 3 [...] M066 M066 |M036+1(N30D)| , 5 M146 [...] , [...] [...] , 1 |M305+M320| [...] M260~1 , 1 |M036+1(N30D)| , 2[?] [...] M297 , 2 + 1(N39B) + 2(N30C)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] M371 M387 M009 M264~a1 , 3(N01)# [...] M066# M066 |M036+1(N30D)| , 5(N01) M146 [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N01) |M305+M320| [...] M260~1 , 1(N01) |M036+1(N30D)| , 2(N01)#? [...] M297# , 2(N01) 1(N39B) 2(N30C)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 5037. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009280) — 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.