Position in chronology
ARET 03, 065
About this tablet
An accounting fragment from the palace archives of Ebla in northern Syria, written around 2350 BCE — one of thousands of tablets recovered from the burned royal palace at Tell Mardikh. It tallies large quantities of wool and finished textiles: measures of raw wool, hundreds of chest-bands or sashes, and hundreds of tug2-du8 cloth items, with at least one personal name (Gati) marking a recipient or supplier. Textiles were the backbone of Ebla's economy and diplomacy, and ledgers like this one show the sheer industrial scale of its wool trade. The final summary line, with a figure in the thousands, is broken away.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a running textile inventory. One entry lists 50 measures of wool, 200 chest-bands, and something for a person whose name begins with I- but is broken off; then 80 of an unreadable item and 40 tug2-du8 cloths. A parallel entry repeats 50 measures of wool and 200 chest-bands, this time under the name Gati. After a gap, the totals mount: 320 measures of wool, 660 tug2-du8 cloths, 750 more measures of wool, and a figure of 3,000 of something now lost. The grand total at the end is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 50 KIN-measures of wool, 2 hundred chest-band[s] (níg-lá gaba), I-[...] (name broken), 80 [...], 40 tug2-du8 textiles, 50 KIN-measures of wool, 2 hundred chest-bands, Gati. (Break) [...] [...] 3 hund[red] 20 KIN-measures of wool, 6 hundred 60 tug2-du8 textiles, 7 hundred 50 KIN-measures of wool, 3 thousand [...]; [gr]and total: [...].
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
5(u@c) KIN SIKI 2(asz@c) mi-at _nig2-la2 gaba#_ i?-[...] 1(gesz2@c) 2(u@c) [x x] 4(u@c) _tug2-du8_ 5(u@c) KIN SIKI 2(asz@c) mi-at _nig2-la2 gaba_ ga-ti [...] [...]3 mi-[at] 2(u@c) KIN SIKI 6(asz@c) mi-at 1(gesz2@c) _tug2-du8_ 7(asz@c) mi-at 5(u@c) KIN SIKI 3(asz@c) li [...] _[szu]-nigin2_ [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 065. 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 (P242250) — 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.