Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 5047
About this tablet
A proto-Elamite administrative tablet from ancient Susa (in modern Iran), dating to the late fourth millennium BCE — roughly contemporary with the earliest writing in Mesopotamia. Each line appears to record a commodity sign followed by a numerical quantity, the standard format of proto-Elamite accounting. The signs used here belong to the proto-Elamite script, which remains largely undeciphered, so the specific goods being counted cannot be identified with certainty. This tablet is a specimen of one of the earliest bureaucratic record-keeping systems in human history, used by administrators at Susa to track goods, animals, or people.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a damaged accounting record. Each surviving entry names a category of goods — the exact commodities are unknown because the script has not been fully deciphered — and assigns each a quantity of one unit. Several lines are too broken or obscured to read at all. The overall structure is a simple tally: one type of thing, one unit; another type of thing, one unit; and so on. Most of the tablet's content is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] x , 1 x , 1 x , 1[?] M288[?] , 1 M262[?] [...] , [...] M288[?] , 1 M146~d M388 M218 M223 M218 , 1 x [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] x , 1(N01) x , 1(N01) x , 1(N01)# M288# , 1(N01) M262# [...] , [...] M288# , 1(N01) M146~d M388 M218 M223 M218 , 1(N01) x [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 5047. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009290) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
Related tablets
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.