Position in chronology
ARET 03, 080
About this tablet
A fragment of an administrative tablet from the palace archives of Ebla in western Syria, written around 2400–2300 BCE. It belongs to the vast records of textiles and precious objects that the Ebla court distributed as gifts and payments — here a gold-fitted dagger, a belt, linen, and multicolored garments issued to a named (but now lost) recipient. These lists are among our best evidence for how a Bronze Age kingdom used luxury goods as instruments of diplomacy and reward.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a snippet of a palace ledger. One entry records the issue of a belt, a siti-dum item, and a curved-blade dagger fitted with thirty shekels' worth of gold, given to a man whose name is broken away. After a gap, another entry lists one linen garment, one fine-quality garment, and one double-wrapped multicolored garment; the rest of the line, and the rest of the tablet, is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 belt (íb-lá), 1 siti-dum, 1 dagger with curved blade ('tail'-dagger) of 30 (shekels) of gold — for the man of [...] [...] 1 linen garment, 1 fine (garment), 1 double-íb garment of multicolored cloth [...]
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) _ib2-la2_ 1(asz@c) si-ti-dum 1(asz@c) _gir2 kun_ TAR _ku3-sig17_ _lu2_ [...] [...] 1(asz@c) _gada#_ 1(asz@c@90) _SAL_ 1(asz@c) _|IB2+2(DISZ@t)| dar tug2_ [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 080. 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 (P242265) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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