Position in chronology
ARET 03, 075
About this tablet
A fragment of an administrative textile account from the palace archives of Ebla in northern Syria, written in the mid-third millennium BCE. It tallies small numbers of different garment types — wraps, cloaks, and mantles — the kind of luxury cloth Ebla produced and distributed as payment, gift, and trade goods. Thousands of such records survive from the Ebla archive, together documenting one of the earliest well-attested textile industries in history. This piece is broken, so we cannot tell who received these garments 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 short inventory of clothing: one zara-cloth, eleven aktum-cloths, thirteen heavy gu-dul cloaks along with one 'à-da-um outer garment, and one textile of the type called TUG2-NI-NI. A further entry followed — another quantity of some textile — but the tablet is broken there and the rest is lost. In today's terms, it reads like a warehouse packing slip from a royal clothing storehouse: item types and counts, nothing more.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 zara-textile, 11 aktum-textiles, 13 gu-dul cloaks (and) 1 'à-da-um garment, 1 TUG2-NI-NI textile, [... ... textile(s) ...] (remainder broken)
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) _zara6_ 1(u@c) 1(asz@c) _aktum_ 1(u@c) 3(asz@c) _gu-dul3_ 'a3-da-um 1(disz@t) 1(asz@c) TUG2-NI-NI [x x (x) TUG2 ...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 075. 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 (P242260) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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