Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 5217
About this tablet
A small, heavily damaged Proto-Elamite administrative tablet from Susa (modern Shush, southwestern Iran), dated to the Uruk period, roughly 3200–3000 BCE. It records a series of numerical entries alongside commodity or institutional sign-groups whose meanings remain undeciphered — Proto-Elamite has not yet been read as a language. The numbers use a mixed notation system (N01, N14, N39B) typical of proto-Elamite accounting: likely tally units of different orders of magnitude. This fragment is one of thousands of such tablets that document the earliest complex administration in the ancient Near East, outside of Mesopotamia proper, and testifies to the remarkable spread of bureaucratic record-keeping across the ancient world.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives of this tablet is a damaged accounting record: a series of commodity or institutional categories, each paired with a quantity. The numbers range from 1 to at least 43 units (using mixed-base notation). The specific goods or categories being counted cannot be identified — the signs used belong to the Proto-Elamite script, which remains undeciphered. Several lines are too broken to read at all.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] , 1(N01) [sign-group: M338~c M024 M371 M010] , [...] [...] , 4(N14) 2(N01) [M136~c?] , 2(N01) [...] M371 M010 , 4(N01) M388 [...] , [...] [...] , 3(N01) M180 [...] , [...] [...] , 4(N14) 3(N01) 2(N39B)
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) M338~c# M024# M371# M010# , [...] [...] , 4(N14)# 2(N01) M136~c#? , 2(N01)# [...] M371 M010# , 4(N01) M388 [...] , [...] [...] , 3(N01) M180 [...] , [...] [...] , 4(N14)# 3(N01) 2(N39B)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 5217. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009317) — 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.