Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 050
About this tablet
A small round clay tablet from Tell Beydar in northeastern Syria — ancient Nabada — written about 2400 BCE, in the age of the first Syro-Mesopotamian city-states. It is a wool account: the fleece taken at the annual sheep-shearing, booked in six lots of a hundred (the last lot only eighty), with a final small entry of four units of a separate grade of wool described as 'pure'. Tablets like this come from the palace archive at Beydar, one of the earliest bodies of written administration found in Syria, and they show a northern city keeping the same kind of meticulous herd-and-textile accounts as the Sumerian south.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Wool from the sheep shearing, at Kun-bad. Six deliveries recorded: five of one hundred units each and one of eighty. Plus a separate line for four units of the 'bar-ASZ' grade of wool, marked as clean. That is the whole document — a shearing tally, nothing more.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineWool of sheep, (from) the shearing; Kun-bad. 100 (units) 100 (units) 100 (units) 100 (units) 100 (units) 80 (units) Wool of the bar-ASZ type: 4 (units), pure (sikil).
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
siki udu ur4# kun3#-bad3 1(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) 1(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) 1(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) 1(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) 1(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) 1(gesz2@c) 2(u@c) siki bar-ASZ 4(asz@c) SIKIL
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 050. 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 (P227229) — 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.