Position in chronology
ARET 03, 264
About this tablet
A fragment of an administrative tablet from the great palace archive of Ebla in Syria, written around 2350 BCE. It records allotments of wool and fine garments to named individuals — among them, apparently, someone connected to Dusigu, a woman known from other Ebla texts as one of the most powerful figures at court, the favored consort of the king. Textiles were a currency of prestige at Ebla, and lists like this one track who received them and why — here, in one case, explicitly as a purchase price. Only one column of the original tablet survives.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a torn page from a palace ledger. The readable entries say: thirteen stone-weights of wool go to a man whose name is only partly legible, Ra-...-ma-...; after a gap, wool and cloth go to people in the circle of the lady Dusigu — five kin-measures of wool, logged as a purchase price, are issued to Ulu-bari, and four aktum garments go to Iib-malik, identified as 'the brother' of someone whose name is lost. The beginning and end of the text are broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, beginning broken) [...] 13 stone-weights of wool (for) Ra-...-ma-[...] [...] the sister(?) (of) Dusigu; 5 kin-measures of wool — the purchase price — (for) Ulu-bari; 4 aktum-TI textiles (for) Iib-malik, the brother [...] (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(u@c) 3(asz@c) _siki na4_ ra-x-ma-[x] [...] _nin-ni_ du-si-gu2 5(asz@c) KIN SIKI _nig2-sa10_ u3-lu-ba-ri2 4(asz@c) _aktum ti_ i-ib-ma-lik _szesz_ [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 264. 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 (P242457) — 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.