Position in chronology
ARET 03, 019
About this tablet
A fragment of an administrative account from the great palace archives of Ebla in northwestern Syria, written around 2400–2300 BCE. It records luxury goods — metal bracelets of copper overlaid with gold, quantities of wool, and textiles — issued to or received from named individuals such as Tira-il and Gamiš. Tablets like this, thousands of which were found at Tell Mardikh, document the day-to-day movement of wealth through one of the earliest urban economies outside Mesopotamia proper.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a broken piece of a palace ledger. The surviving entries read roughly: a number of copper-and-gold bracelets — ten units — for a man named Tira-il; then a gap where the tablet is broken; then entries connected with Iški(?) and a man named Gamiš; then fifty-seven measures (sixty minus three) of wool from NI-za-u; and finally a count of textiles — some number minus one — before the text breaks off. The rest of the tablet is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, fragment) [n] bracelet(s) of copper (and) gold: 10 (units/shekels?) (for) Tira-il (Break) ... Iški(?) (for) Gamiš 60 minus 3 (= 57) KIN-measures of wool of NI-za-u [n] minus 1(?) [...] textile(s) [...] (remainder broken)
Our translation engine — Fable 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
[n] gu2#-li-lum _a-gar5 ku3-sig17_ 1(u@c) ti-ra-il [...] isz11-ki ga-mi-isz 1(gesz2@c) _la2_ 3(disz@t) KIN SIKI NI-za-u3 [n] _la2_ 1(asz@c)#? [x x] _tug2_ [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 019. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: National Museum of Syria, Idlib, Syria (P242199) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.