Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 047
About this tablet
A small, cushion-shaped clay tablet from Tell Beydar in northeastern Syria — ancient Nabada — written about 2400 BCE, in the age of the Early Dynastic city-states. It is a barley-ration account: measured quantities of grain are set against the ruler (the *en*) and against a man named Dingir-malum, with a note of a two-day period and a month name, and two further names at the end. Beydar's small archive of such tablets is one of the few windows we have onto the administration of a modest northern Syrian town at the dawn of writing in that region, and it shows the same accounting habits — fixed measures, named recipients, dated entries — that were being used far to the south in Sumer.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Grain issue, in the land, covering a two-day period: 8 barig 2 ban of barley to the ruler; 4 barig 1 ban to Dingir-malum. Month SAR. Recorded under [...]-beli and ŠU₂-SA-la. The opening and closing lines are damaged, so the names of the responsible officials are only partly legible.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineThe ruler (en); in the land (kalam); in/for 2 days: 8 barig 2 ban2 (of barley); the ruler; Dingir-malum: 4 barig 1 ban2; [month:] SAR; [...]-beli, ŠU₂-SA-la.
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
_en#_ in kalam in _2(disz@t) u4_ _8(barig@c) 2(ban2@c)_ _en_ dingir-ma-lum _4(barig@c) 1(ban2@c)_ _[iti] sar#_ []be#-li2# SZU2-SA-la
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 047. 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 (P227226) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.