Position in chronology
ARET 03, 045
About this tablet
A fragment of an administrative account from Ebla in western Syria, written around 2400–2300 BCE, when the city's palace ran one of the great textile economies of the Bronze Age. The surviving entries record wool measured in the standard Ebla 'KIN' unit and a hundred male laborers, booked as received by the sa-zax — the palace administrative complex at the heart of Ebla's economy. It is a small piece of the vast palace archive of thousands of tablets discovered at Tell Mardikh, the everyday bookkeeping of a wool-and-labor state.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The readable part of this account says: one hundred KIN-measures of wool and one hundred workmen, taken in hand — received — by the palace administration (the sa-zax). After that the tablet breaks off. When the text resumes, it lists entries connected with someone or somewhere called NE-a-u: five KIN-measures of wool, then one more KIN-measure of wool, at which point the tablet breaks again and the rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 hundred KIN-measures of wool, 1 hundred workmen, received (šu-du8), (of) the sa-zax (the palace administrative complex); [... Break ...] NE-a-u (person/place name): 5 KIN-measures of wool, 1 KIN-measure of [wool ...]
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(asz@c) mi-at KIN SIKI 1(asz@c) mi-at _gurusz_ _szu-du8_ sa-zax(LAK384) [...] NE-a-u3 5(asz@c) KIN SIKI 1(asz@c) KIN [SIKI ...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 045. 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 (P242230) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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Related sources
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