Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 5206
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (modern Shush, Iran), dated to the late fourth millennium BCE — roughly contemporary with the earliest writing in Mesopotamia. The surviving signs record quantities of unidentified commodities, organized in the terse columnar format typical of proto-Elamite accounting. Proto-Elamite script remains undeciphered: individual sign values are not known, so the specific goods and transactions cannot be named. What is clear is that this was part of a systematic recording effort — the same administrative impulse that produced the earliest cuneiform tablets in Uruk, just expressed in a parallel and still-mysterious script.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This fragment preserves only a few entries from what was once a commodity ledger. One line records a single unit against a pair of unidentified item-signs; another entry shows a total of four units of something; a third line appears to open with a further commodity designation before breaking off entirely. The specific goods, and any personal names that may have been involved, are lost — partly from physical damage, partly because proto-Elamite itself remains undeciphered. The rest is too broken to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] 1(N01) [x] [...] [...] M347 M371 |M036+1(N30D)| , 1(N14@b) [...] M305 M388 M285~s M371 M210~g[?] [...] , [...] [...] , 4(N1@b) M176~b[...] , [...]
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)# x , [...] [...] M347 M371 |M036+1(N30D)| , 1(N14@b) [...] M305 M388 M285~s M371 M210~g#? [...] , [...] [...] , 4(N1@b) M176~b# [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 5206. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009306) — 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.