Position in chronology
ARET 03, 238
About this tablet
A fragment of an administrative record from the palace archives of Ebla in northern Syria, written around 2400 BCE. It belongs to the vast bookkeeping of the Ebla court, which tracked deliveries of luxury textiles and precious-metal objects — garments, belts, bracelets, and gold plates — given as gifts or payments to named individuals. Though badly broken, it is a small window onto the wealth and gift economy of one of the earliest great cities outside Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a list of valuables issued from the palace stores: one fine garment for someone whose name ends in '-mu-da-u'; a multicolored belt together with a bracelet made of copper and silver; then three guzitum robes, three zara textiles, and three fine multicolored belts; and finally a gold plate weighing forty shekels (about 315 grams). The beginnings and ends of the entries, and the names of most recipients, are broken away and lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, fragmentary) [...] 1 fine (garment) [...] [... the person ...]-mu-da-u (a personal name, beginning lost) (Break) [...] a multicolored belt-garment, 1 bracelet of copper (and) silver, ... [...] 3 guzitum-garments, 3 zara-textiles, 3 fine multicolored belt-garments, 1 plate (of) gold, (weighing) 40 (shekels), (Break — remainder of the text lost)
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
[...] 1(asz@c) _SAL_ [...] [...]-mu-da#?-u3 [...] [...] _|IB2+3(DISZ@t)| dar tug2_ 1(asz@c) gu2-li-lum _a-gar5-gar5 ku3:babbar_ x-[...] 3(asz@c) gu-zi-tum# 3(asz@c) _zara6_ 3(asz@c) _|IB2+3(DISZ@t)| dar sa6 tug2_ 1(asz@c) _dib_ |GA2xLA2| SZA-PI _ku3-sig17_ [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 238. 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 (P242430) — 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.