Position in chronology
MDP 26S, 5235
About this tablet
A small, heavily fragmented administrative tablet from ancient Susa (in modern Iran), dating to the Uruk period — roughly 3300–3000 BCE. It belongs to the very earliest horizon of writing known anywhere in the world, a time when recordkeeping was just being invented. The surviving signs appear to record quantities of commodities (each entry marked with tally numerals such as '1' or '2') under sign-categories whose meanings we cannot yet fully read. It is a piece of the ancient accounting system that drove early urban economies in both Mesopotamia and southwestern Iran.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is too broken to recover a continuous text. What survives is a series of short entries, each pairing an unidentified commodity or category sign with a small count — one unit here, two units there. The classifier sign M388 recurs between entries, probably marking a category boundary. The surrounding sign groups are either too damaged or not yet deciphered well enough to say what goods are being counted. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] M128? M096 [...] , [...] [...] [M250~ba?] M066~a , 1(N01) M388 [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N01) M510 x [...] , [...] [...] M367? , 2(N01) M388 [...] , [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] M128#? M096 [...] , [...] [...] M250~ba# M066~a , 1(N01) M388 [...] , [...] [...] , 1(N01) M510 x [...] , [...] [...] M367? , 2(N01) M388 [...] , [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — MDP 26S, 5235. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P009333) — 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.