Position in chronology
ARET 03, 248
About this tablet
A fragment of an administrative record from the palace archives of Ebla in northern Syria, around 2350 BCE. It logs disbursements of luxury goods — a gold plaque weighed in shekels, multicoloured kilts, and fine garments — to named individuals, including a craftsman: Ibga-il the leatherworker. Thousands of such tablets from Ebla show a sophisticated bureaucracy tracking textiles and precious metals as payments and gifts, and this scrap preserves a few entries from one such ledger.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a page from a palace disbursement ledger, most of it broken away. One entry issues a gold plaque weighing eleven shekels to someone's son — the name is lost. After a gap, another entry records a number of multicoloured kilts going to Ibga-il, the leatherworker. A further line lists one zara-robe and two fine garments before the text breaks off again. The rest of the tablet is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 1 plaque of 1(u) 1(aš) — eleven (shekels of) — gold, (for) the son [...] (Break) [n] multicoloured kilts (íb+III-TÚG dar) [...], (for) Ibga-il, the leatherworker. 1 zara-garment (TÚG-NI&NI), 2 fine (garments) [...] (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
1(asz@c) _dib_ 1(u@c) 1(asz@c) _ku3-sig17_ _dumu-nita_ [...] [n] _|IB2+3(DISZ@t)|# dar_ [x] ib-ga-il _aszgab_ 1(asz@c) TUG2-|NI&NI| 2(asz@c) _SAL_ [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 248. 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 (P242441) — 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.