Position in chronology
ARET 03, 284
About this tablet
A small broken fragment from the great palace archives of Ebla in western Syria, written around 2400–2300 BCE. It belongs to the administrative bookkeeping of the Ebla court: a list recording metal plates or ingots ('dib', at Ebla usually precious-metal objects) issued to or received from named individuals, one entry connected with the town of Hazuwan. Even in this damaged state it shows the reach of Ebla's economy — goods, people, and towns of northern Syria tracked line by line by palace scribes.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a scrap of an account ledger. One line records a single metal plate credited to a man named Ri-i-Malik; after a gap, another entry lists two such plates, with a damaged notation, for a person whose name begins NI-BAD-na..., in connection with the town of Hazuwan. The final readable lines preserve the ends of two more personal names, the last of them Išma-daban. The rest of the tablet is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, fragmentary) [...]-mu 1 dib-plate (of metal): Ri-i-Malik [...] (Break) 2 dib-plates ... (sign group ŠÚ+ŠA doubled, meaning unclear) NI-BAD-na-... [...] (of/for) Hazuwan [...] (Break) [...]-NI [Iš]ma-daban
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
[...]-mu# 1(asz@c) _dib_ ri2-i3-ma-lik [...] 2(asz@c) _dib_ |SZU2+SZA|-|SZU2+SZA| NI-BAD-na-x [...] ha-zu-wa-an [...] [...]-NI [isz]-ma2-da-ba-an
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — ARET 03, 284. 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 (P242477) — 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.