Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 033
About this tablet
A small clay tablet from Tell Beydar in northeastern Syria — ancient Nabada — written around 2400 BCE, in the last decades before the site was abandoned. It records fattened sheep set aside as offerings and allotted in small lots (three here, two there) in connection with named men: Izilum, Arrum, and Aršī-aḫu. It is ordinary palace bookkeeping, but it is precious: Beydar is one of the very few Early Dynastic archives found in Syria rather than southern Iraq, and its scribes wrote a local mix of Sumerian signs and Semitic words. The reverse and the final lines are too eroded to recover.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Offering account: fattened sheep, in the month of Sar. Charged with Izilum of Magan(?): three sheep. With Arrum: two. With Aršī-aḫu: (amount lost). Dated to a day in the term of Abi-[...]. The last line preserves only a figure of three and is otherwise broken away; the reverse is too worn to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineFood-offering(?): fattened sheep; month of Sar(?); (sign: LAGAB×SIG₇) with(?): Izilum of Magan(?) / Šamagan; 3 sheep — with(?): Arrum: 2; with(?): Aršī-a[ḫu]. On the day [...] Abi-[...] [... ...] 3(?) [...]
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
nidba2# udu# niga iti-sar | |LAGABxSIG7| asz2-de3 i-zi#-lum sza:ma-gan 3(asz@c) udu asz2-de3 ar-rum2 2(asz@c) asz2-de3 ar#-szi#-a#-[hu] in u4# [x] a-bi#-[x] [x x] 3(asz@c)#? [x]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 033. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: National Museum of Syria, Der-ez-Zor, Syria (P227212) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
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.