Position in chronology
ARET 03, 081
About this tablet
An accounting tablet from the palace archives of Ebla in northwestern Syria, around 2350 BCE — one of thousands recovered from the famous archive at Tell Mardikh. It records exchanges of precious metal: measured amounts of gold and silver, weighed by the 'Dilmun shekel' standard, set against goods such as a gold plate and a team of three hybrid equids (mule-like animals prized as chariot teams), with named individuals as recipients. It is a fragment of the bookkeeping that made Ebla one of the great commercial powers of the Early Bronze Age.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a currency-exchange record. Fifty shekels of gold covered one gold plate, credited to Bur-ḫaš of the town of Adabig. Ten shekels of silver went to Kum-NE. After a gap in the text, the account resumes: one mina and forty shekels of silver to NE-adum; and Ri'i-ḫalam took receipt of three kunga equids — the valuable donkey-onager hybrids used to pull chariots. A final entry of fifteen shekels of silver follows, but the rest of the tablet is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineExchange transaction (šu-bala-ak): 50 shekels (Dilmun standard) of gold — 1 plate (ingot): Bur-ḫaš of Adabig. 10 shekels (Dilmun standard) of silver: Kum-NE. (Break) 1 mina and 40 shekels (Dilmun standard) of silver: NE-a-dum. 3 kunga-equids: Ri'i-ḫalam received. 15 [shekels (Dilmun standard)] of silver [...] (text breaks off)
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
_szu bala ak_ 5(u@c) GIN2-DILMUN _ku3-sig17_ 1(asz@c) _dib_ bur-ha-asz2 a-da-bi2-ig 1(u@c) GIN2-DILMUN _ku3:babbar_ kum-NE [...] 1(asz@c) _ma-na_ |SZU2+SZA| GIN2-DILMUN _ku3:babbar_ NE-a-dum 3(asz@c) kunga2 ri2-i3-ha-lam _szu ba4-ti_ 1(u@c) 5(asz@c) [GIN2-DILMUN] _ku3#:babbar_ [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 081. 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 (P242266) — 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.