Position in chronology
ARET 03, 268
About this tablet
A fragment of an administrative textile account from the great palace archive of Ebla in northern Syria, written around 2350 BCE. The palace bureaucracy tracked thousands of distributions of cloaks, tunics, and kilts to officials, messengers, and foreign dignitaries, and this scrap records one such issue of garments to a man named Arra-dulum. Broken though it is, it belongs to one of the largest and earliest state archives ever recovered, documenting the textile economy that made Ebla wealthy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a clothing-issue record: a certain number of double-style ʾa-da-um cloaks, some aktum-tunics, and one red-dyed kilt were handed out to a man named Arra-dulum, apparently connected with Dulu. After a gap where the tablet is broken, the account continues with one more item and one more kilt, this time of multicoloured cloth, before the text breaks off entirely. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [n] double ʾa-da-um cloaks, [n] aktum-tunics, 1 kilt (íb-III) of ú-ḫáb (red-dyed) wool — (for) Arra-dulum (of) Dulu. (Break) 1 [...], 1 [kilt (íb-...)] , multicoloured, [...] ... [...] (rest broken)
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[n] 'a3-da-um 2(disz@t) [n] _aktum_ 1(asz@c) _|IB2+3(DISZ@t)| u2-hab2-sa_ ar-ra-du-lum du-lu [...] 1(asz@c) [x x] 1(asz@c) [_|IB2+n(DISZ@t)|_] DAR [x] x [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 268. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: National Museum of Syria, Idlib, Syria (P242461) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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