Position in chronology
ARET 03, 030
About this tablet
A fragment of a textile-distribution record from the palace archives of Ebla in western Syria, written around 2350 BCE. The palace routinely issued standard sets of clothing — a cloak, a lighter garment, and a multicolored belt or kilt — to officials, messengers, and dependents, and scribes logged every issue. Here one set goes to a man named Buda-malik, and a triple set of coarser cloth appears further down. Thousands of such tablets from Ebla reveal a sophisticated bureaucracy managing wool and cloth as a form of wealth and payment.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a clothing-issue slip from the Ebla palace stores. Buda-malik received one heavy cloak, one light garment, and one multicolored belt-wrap — the standard three-piece outfit the administration handed out. After a broken passage, an entry mentions Dabdar, and then a larger issue: three coarse-wool textiles of standard grade, together with three light garments and three multicolored belt-wraps, evidently for three recipients. The rest of the tablet is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Obverse) 1 gu-dul cloak, 1 SAL-garment, 1 multicolored belt-garment — (for) Buda-malik [...] Dabdar 3 gu-mug (coarse-wool) textiles of grade 1, 3 SAL-garments, 3 multicolored belt-garments [...] (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
1(asz@c) _gu-dul3_ 1(asz@c) _SAL_ 1(asz@c) _|IB2+3(DISZ@t)| dar tug2_ bu3-da-[ma]-lik [...] dab6-da-ar 3(asz@c) _gu-mug 1(disz@t)_ 3(asz@c) _SAL_ 3(asz@c) _|IB2+3(DISZ@t)| dar tug2_ [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 030. 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 (P242210) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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.
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.