Position in chronology
ARET 03, 130
About this tablet
A fragment of an administrative record from the palace archives of Ebla in western Syria, written in the mid-third millennium BCE. It logs a disbursement of wool — measured in the local Eblaite unit called a ziru — issued by order to several named individuals, one of whom is identified as a 'man of the quay', likely a merchant or harbor agent. Though badly broken, it is a small window into the textile economy that made Ebla one of the great commercial powers of Early Bronze Age Syria.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a wool disbursement slip, badly damaged. What survives says: one ziru-measure of wool was issued by order — the details of the order are lost — to a group of named recipients: I-in-ilum, Iti-mud-il, then (after a gap) Miga and Durium, the latter identified as an agent of the quay, that is, a trading-post official. A further broken line contains a term, AN-ŠE₃-GU₂, that may be a place-name. The rest of the tablet is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 ziru-measure of wool, ordered (du₁₁-ga) [...] (for) I-in-ilum, (for) Iti-mud-il, [...] (for) Miga, (for) Durium, the man of the quay, [...] AN-ŠE₃-GU₂ (meaning uncertain: perhaps a place-name or orientation term) [...]
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) zi-ri2 _siki_ _du11-ga_ [...] i-in-i3-lum i-ti-mu-ud-il [...] mi-ga du-ri2-um _lu2 kar_ [...] AN-SZE3-GU2 [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 130. 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 (P242318) — 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.