Position in chronology
ARET 03, 282
About this tablet
A broken corner of a textile-distribution record from the palace archives of Ebla in western Syria, written around 2350 BCE. The palace bureaucracy tracked the issue of fine and multicoloured garments and kilts to named individuals — here Išgi-barzu, a person whose name is partly lost, and Puzurra-Malik. Thousands of such accounts survive from Ebla, and together they map out the flow of luxury cloth that lubricated the diplomacy and economy of one of the earliest great Syrian states.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a clothing-issue slip, most of it broken away. What survives reads roughly: one fine garment and one high-quality multicoloured kilt; more fine multicoloured textiles whose count is lost; issued to a man named Išgi-barzu and to another whose name ends in '-dugu'; the transaction was handled in connection with (or through) someone or something now lost, and a man named Puzurra-Malik appears at the end, likely as recipient or intermediary. The beginnings of most lines are gone.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[obverse] [...] 1 fine garment, 1 multicoloured, fine-quality kilt (íb-III-TÚG), [...] fine, multicoloured [textiles], (for) Išgi-barzu, (and for) [...]-dugu, in/by [...] Puzurra-Malik.
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_ 1(asz@c) _|IB2+3(DISZ@t)| dar sa6 tug2_ [...] _sa6 dar_ isz11-gi-bar-zu2 [...]-du-gu2 in [...] PUZUR4-ra-ma-lik
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 282. 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 (P242475) — 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.