Position in chronology
ARET 03, 011
About this tablet
A fragment of an administrative tablet from the palace archives of Ebla in northern Syria, written around 2350–2300 BCE. It records small outlays of wool and finished garments — a mantle and a coloured kilt — booked against named individuals, with the standard Eblaite receipt formula 'he received.' Thousands of such textile records were kept by the palace scribes; together they document one of the largest cloth-producing and cloth-distributing economies of the third millennium BCE.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
For Ba-ga-ma: four kin-units of wool. (The next entry is lost.) A-ba-da-du signed for his allotment. One mantle and one multicoloured kilt, issued to Gi-da-na-im. The rest of the tablet is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineBa-ga(?)-ma; 4 kin-measures of wool; […] (broken) A-ba-da-du — he received. 1 gu-dul (mantle), 1 íb-III multicoloured textile (kilt); Gi-da-na-im; […] (broken)
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
ba-ga?-ma 4(asz@c) KIN SIKI [...] a-ba-da-du _szu ba4-ti_ 1(asz@c) _gu-dul3_ 1(asz@c) _|IB2+3(DISZ@t)| dar tug2_ gi-da-na-im [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 011. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: National Museum of Syria, Idlib, Syria (P242191) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.