Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 032
About this tablet
A badly shattered accounting tablet from Tell Beydar in northeastern Syria (ancient Nabada), written around 2400 BCE in the Early Dynastic period. What survives is a column of grain quantities — measured in gur, barig and ban — set beside the names or titles of the people responsible, among them a man connected with ploughing. It is the ordinary bookkeeping of a Syrian palace or temple estate: who received or delivered how much barley. Too little is preserved to know the totals or the occasion, but tablets like this are the main evidence for how the small kingdom of Nabada ran its fields.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A grain ledger, mostly destroyed. The surviving entries read: something, 3 barig; Lu-geš-DU, the ploughman, 3 (units); another name, 3 barig; a further entry, 4 ban; a person whose name ends in '-E', 3 units and 2 barig; another, 2 units; then an entry of so many gur, 5 barig and 3 ban. The last line breaks off after a name, and the rest of the tablet — including whatever total the scribe drew at the end — is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) … [ … ] 3 barig [ … ] Lu-geš-DU, the plough(man): 3 (aš) [ … ] 3 barig [ … … ] [ … ] 4 ban …-E-[ … ]: 3 (aš) 2 barig [ … ] [ … ] 2 (aš) [ … ] [ … ] gur 5 barig 3 ban [ … ] … [ … ] (The remainder of the tablet — including the reverse and any totals — is broken away; no further lines are preserved in the transliteration.)
Our translation engine — Opus 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
x [x] 3(barig@c)#? [x] lu2-gesz#-DU# APIN 3(asz@c) [x] 3(barig@c)#? [x x] [...] 4(ban2@c) x-e2-[x] 3(asz@c)# 2(barig@c) [x] [...] 2(asz@c) [...] [x] gur 5(barig@c) 3(ban2@c) [x] x [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 032. 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, Der-ez-Zor, Syria (P227211) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.