Position in chronology
SE 126
About this tablet
A small administrative accounting tablet from the proto-Elamite or proto-cuneiform Uruk period, probably from Susa in southwestern Iran, dating to roughly 3200–3000 BCE. It records quantities — expressed in the numerical notation N01 — against a series of commodity or institutional signs that remain undeciphered. Tablets like this one are among the very earliest bureaucratic records ever produced: not yet a language in the full sense, but a structured system for tracking goods, allocations, or rations within a complex institution. Most of its signs cannot yet be read with any confidence, which makes every new attestation valuable for scholars working to crack proto-Elamite script.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is an accounting record listing several commodity entries alongside small numerical counts — mostly ones and twos in the standard tally notation of the period. The signs used for the commodities themselves are not yet deciphered, so we can say: 'item A: 1 unit; item B: 2 units; item C: 2 units,' but we cannot yet say what those items were. Several lines are too damaged or broken to read at all. The rest is too fragmentary to reconstruct.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] x , [M195+M038] (damaged) x M388 M371 x [...] , [...] [...] M314 (damaged) M128 (damaged) M388 M297 (damaged) x M206~d (damaged) , 1(N01) M177 , 2(N01) x , [...] [...] , [...] [M377+M320+M377] , 2(N01)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
x , |M195+M038|# x M388 M371 x [...] , [...] [...] M314# M128# M388 M297# x M206~d# , 1(N01) M177 , 2(N01) x , [...] [...] , [...] |M377+M320+M377| , 2(N01)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Proto-Elamite (ca. 3100-2900 BC)) — SE 126. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Couvent Saint-Etienne, Jerusalem (P009443) — 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.