Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 034
About this tablet
A small clay tablet from Tell Beydar in northeastern Syria — ancient Nabada — written about 2350 BCE, in the last generations before the Akkadian empire. It is a livestock disbursement note: a handful of sheep and goats issued as food offerings, some earmarked for the palace kitchen, recorded under a month name and the name of a man, Kur-ilum. Documents like this one come from the palace archive of a modest Syrian city that kept accounts in Sumerian script but in a local, Semitic-speaking administrative tradition, and they show how tightly a small northern town tracked the animals moving through its storerooms.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Provisions account: fattened sheep, recorded in the month iti-sar GAN, for the ašde allocation, under Kur-ilum. To the kitchen: one sheep. Also one female kid, one kid, and one sheep. That is the whole record — a short ledger of four animals released for offerings and for the cooks, with the reverse of the tablet left blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineFood offering(s). Fattened sheep. Month: iti-sar GAN. (For) the ašde-(rite/allotment). Kur-ilum. The house of the cook (kitchen): 1 sheep. 1 female kid. 1 kid. 1 sheep.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
nidba2# udu niga iti-sar GAN asz2-de3 kur-i3-lum e2 muhaldim 1(asz@c) udu asz2#-gar3 1(asz@c) 1(asz@c) masz2 1(asz@c) udu
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 034. 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 (P227213) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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