Position in chronology
ARET 03, 062
About this tablet
A fragment of an administrative textile account from the palace archives of Ebla in western Syria, written around 2350 BCE. The surviving lines tally large batches of 'ib-garments' — belts or kilts — graded by quality ('fine', 'first quality') and finish ('multicolored'). Ebla's economy revolved around wool and cloth, and thousands of tablets like this record the palace's issue and receipt of textiles; the counts here (over a hundred pieces per entry) show industrial-scale production. The tablet is broken, so we cannot see who received the goods or on what occasion.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a stock ledger for cloth. It counts out 103 top-grade kilts in fine, multicolored weave, one more single kilt of the very first quality in the same fine multicolored finish, and a further 141 multicolored kilts of the standard triple grade. A damaged opening line recorded at least six more items, perhaps of the fine/thin type, but the number is partly lost. The tablet breaks off after these entries, so whatever totals, recipients, or dates followed are gone.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [n +] 6(?) ... fine/thin(?) (textiles); 103 ib-garments of triple quality, fine, multicolored; 1 ib-garment of triple quality, fine, multicolored, of first quality; 141 ib-garments of triple quality, multicolored; [...] (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] 6(asz@c)#? _SAL_ 1(asz@c) mi-at 3(asz@c) _|IB2+3(DISZ@t)| sa6 dar_ 1(asz@c) _|IB2+3(DISZ@t)| sa6 dar sag_ 1(asz@c) mi-at 4(u@c) 1(asz@c) _|IB2+3(DISZ@t)| dar_ [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 062. 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 (P242247) — 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.