Position in chronology
ARET 03, 204
About this tablet
A fragment of a garment-distribution record from the royal palace archive of Ebla in northern Syria, about 2350 BCE. The palace administration handed out finished cloth — the standard Eblaite kilt, in a multicoloured weave, some of it graded 'fine' — to named men, one of whom is identified as the overseer of the (city or palace) gate. Thousands of such tablets were found at Tell Mardikh, and together they show how a Bronze Age Syrian court used textiles as both clothing and currency, rewarding officials and servants by name.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving entries list cloth issued to named men. One multicoloured kilt of fine grade goes to Ḫalza'um, the gate overseer, and to a man called Ba-DU; the line after that is broken beyond reading. The second column records two multicoloured kilts for Raba, Mulu and NE-DI, and there the tablet breaks off. Everything below and to the left is lost to damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, column i) [...] 1 kilt-cloth (íb-III-TÚG), multicoloured, fine quality, (for) Ḫal-za-um, overseer of the gate; Ba-DU; [...] (traces of two or three signs) [...] (column ii) 2 kilt-cloths (íb-III-TÚG), multicoloured, (for) Ra-ba, Mu-lu, NE-DI [...] (remainder lost)
Our translation engine — Opus 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
[...]1 _|IB2+3(DISZ@t)| dar sa6 tug2_ HAL-za-um _ugula ka2_ _ba4_-DU [(x)] x x [...] 2(asz@c) _|IB2+3(DISZ@t)| dar tug2_ ra-ba mu-lu NE#-DI [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 204. 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 (P242396) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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