Position in chronology
ARET 03, 022
About this tablet
An accounting fragment from the palace archives of Ebla in northern Syria, written around 2400 BCE. It records silver payments, receipts, and purchases — including draught animals, an 'Amorite dagger' of gold given to someone's son, and a price paid in two hundred measures of fine wool. Ebla's archive of thousands of such tablets is our richest window into the economy of Early Bronze Age Syria, where silver, wool, and prestige weapons circulated between the palace and outside partners.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a page from a palace ledger, broken in several places. It logs a few shekels of silver formally received, then names a person (Sula-...), two mature draught teams, and half a shekel of silver. After a gap, it books roughly a shekel of silver as a purchase price, received by someone whose name begins Za-. Then comes the standout item: one gold dagger in the Amorite style, issued to the son of a man whose name begins I-. Its price is set at two hundred stone-weights of high-quality wool. The remaining lines are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[n] shekel(s) (Dilmun standard) of silver — receipt (šu-ti-ag) [...] Sula-[...] 2 full-grown draught teams (surₓ) 1/2 shekel (Dilmun standard) of silver [...] 1(?) [+ x shekels (Dilmun standard)] of silver: the pri[ce] — receipt (šu-ti-ag) (of) Za-[...] 1 Amorite dagger of gold (for) the son (of) I-[...] [The pr]ice: 2 hundred 'stone'(-weights) of fine wool [...] ... [...]
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] GIN2-DILMUN _ku3:babbar_ szu-ti-ag [...] su-la-[(x)] 2(asz@c) _surx(|HIxMASZ|) mah_ 1/2(asz@c) GIN2-DILMUN _ku3:babbar_ [...] 1(asz@c)#? [x GIN2-DILMUN] _ku3:babbar_ _nig2-[sa10]_ szu-ti-ag za-[...] 1(asz@c) _gir2 mar-tu ku3-sig17_ _dumu-nita_ i-[...] _[nig2]-sa10_ 2(asz@c) mi-at _siki na4 sa6_ [x]-x [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 022. 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 (P242202) — 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.