Position in chronology
ARET 03, 129
About this tablet
A fragment of an administrative account from the great Syrian city of Ebla, written around 2400–2300 BCE, recording allotments of wool measured in the standard local 'kin' unit. Each entry pairs a quantity of wool with named individuals — Semitic personal names like Buda-Malik and Ama-Malik — some identified as the 'man of' (dependent or agent of) another person. Ebla's palace archives, discovered at Tell Mardikh in the 1970s, contain thousands of such texts and are our richest window into the economy of early Bronze Age Syria; this piece is a small leaf from that vast bureaucratic ledger.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a wool distribution ledger, broken at top and edges. What survives reads roughly: Ir'am-da'ar and Gasa received 4 kin-measures of wool; Enna-BE received 6 kin-measures (the rest of that line is lost); another 6 kin-measures went to Buda-Malik and Ama-Malik. After a gap, the text identifies someone as an agent of Ir-iba, then lists Ir-iba himself, described as the agent of a person whose name is now broken away. The beginning and end of the account are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineIr'am-da'ar, Gasa: 4 kin-measures of wool. Enna-BE: 6 kin-measures of wool [...] 6 kin-measures of wool: Buda-Malik, Ama-Malik, [...] the man of Ir-iba; Ir-iba, the man of [...]
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
ir3-am6-da-ar ga-sa 4(asz@c) KIN SIKI en-na-BE 6(asz@c) KIN SIKI [...] 6(asz@c) KIN SIKI bu-da-ma-lik a-ma-ma-lik# [...] _lu2#_ ir3-i3-ba ir3-i3-ba _lu2#_ [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 129. 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 (P242317) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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