Position in chronology
ARET 03, 084
About this tablet
A scrap of textile accounting from the royal archives of Ebla in western Syria, around 2350 BCE. A palace scribe recorded an outgoing consignment of woven goods — multicolored kilts of different grades, coarse tow-cloth, and raw wool — and dated it by the local month name. Ebla's economy ran heavily on wool and cloth, and thousands of tablets like this one document the palace handing out garments as payments, gifts, and rations; this fragment is a small page of that vast ledger.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is an outgoing-goods slip from the palace stores: 14 good-quality multicolored kilts and 18 multicolored kilts of the triple type were issued, part of a batch totaling 63 textiles altogether (the entries accounting for the rest of the total stood in the now-lost portion of the tablet). The disbursement was booked in the month MAxGANA₂-SAG. A further note records 8 coarse tow-cloths and 10 standard measures of wool. The rest of the tablet's surface is broken away or worn smooth.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine14 íb-garments (kilts), of good quality, multicolored; 20 minus 2 (= 18) triple íb-garments (kilts), multicolored — textiles. Total: 63 textiles. Outgoing (expenditure). Month: MAxGANA₂-SAG. 10 minus 2 (= 8) gu-mug (coarse tow-cloth) textiles; 10 kin-measures of wool.
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(u@c) 4(asz@c) _|IB2+n(DISZ@t)|# sa6 dar_ 2(u@c) _la2_ 2(disz@t) _|IB2+3(DISZ@t)| dar tug2_ _szu-nigin2_ 1(gesz2@c) 3(asz@c) _tug2-tug2_ _e3_ ITI |MAxGAN2@t|-SAG 1(u@c) _la2_ 2(disz@t) _gu-mug_ 1(u@c) KIN SIKI
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 084. 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 (P242269) — 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.