Position in chronology
ARET 03, 235 + unp. frag.
About this tablet
A broken accounting tablet from the great Syrian city of Ebla, around 2400–2300 BCE, from the famous palace archive tradition. It records outgoing luxury goods — silver, fine garments, boxwood, and portions of ox and sheep meat — assigned to named individuals, including the wife of a man called EN-NE and a person named Šubur. Thousands of such disbursement records survive from Ebla, and together they map the flow of wealth through one of the earliest great palace economies outside Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The readable part of this ledger says: about twenty shekels of silver went to the wife of EN-NE, along with boxwood connected to the place KUR-KI. Then one guzi-cloth and one aktum garment were issued to someone whose name is lost. Ten cuts of beef, ten cuts of mutton, and ten of something else went to a man named NE-LUM attached to the fattening house, together with one Luzi-(so-and-so). Finally, one zara-textile of a particular grade was given to Šubur. The beginning and end of the tablet are broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, fragmentary) [...] 20(?) (shekels of) silver: the wife of EN-NE (of/from) KUR-KI; boxwood. 1 guzi-textile, 1 aktum-garment [...] 10 inner cuts of ox, 10 inner cuts of sheep, 10 ... [...] (for) NE-LUM, of the ušga (fattening/cult establishment); Luzi-[...]. 1 zara-textile of TAR (quality/half-size?): Šubur. [...] (remainder broken)
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
[...] 2(u@c)#? _ku3:babbar_ _dam_ EN-NE KUR-KI TASKARIN 1(asz@c) gu-zi 1(asz@c@90) _aktum_ [...] 1(u@c) SZA3 _gu4_ 1(u@c) SZA3 _udu_ 1(u@c) x [...] NE-LUM usz-ga lu-zi-[...] 1(asz@c) _zara6_ TAR _szubur_ [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 235 + unp. frag.. 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 (P242427) — 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.