Position in chronology
ARET 03, 151
About this tablet
A fragment of an administrative textile account from the great Syrian city of Ebla, around 2400 BCE. The palace bureaucracy at Ebla tracked enormous quantities of cloth — belts, wraps, and fine garments — issued to officials, workers, and foreign envoys, and this broken tablet preserves a few entries from one such ledger: dyed belts (red-brown and black) and small lots of standard garment types. Tablets like this, thousands of which were found in the burned palace archive, are our main window into the textile industry that made Ebla wealthy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a short surviving stretch of a clothing inventory: eight fiber belts dyed a reddish-brown with a dye plant, and five more of the same kind in black. After a gap in the tablet, the list resumes with at least two zara-cloths, five guzitum garments (a cloak-like Ebla textile), and one aktum garment — a fine cloth or wrap. The rest of the account, before and after these entries, is broken away and lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine8 belts of rush-fiber (ZI&ZI-A), (dyed) red-brown (with the ḫab-plant); 5 belts of rush-fiber (ZI&ZI-A), black; (Break) 2[+n] zara-textiles; 5 guzitum-garments; 1 aktum-garment; (Break)
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
8(asz@c) _nig2-la2_ |ZI&ZI|-A _u2-hab2_ 5(asz@c) _nig2-la2_ |ZI&ZI|-A _gi6_ [...] 2[+N] ZARA6 5(asz@c) gu-zi-dum 1(asz@c) _aktum_ [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 151. 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 (P242343) — 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.