Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 055
About this tablet
A small clay tablet from Tell Beydar in northeastern Syria — ancient Nabada — written around 2400 BCE, in the era when Semitic-speaking scribes in the upper Habur region were adapting Sumerian writing to their own language. It is a short accounting list: a column of personal names, each allotted one unit of something, with a subtotal of five barig of grain in the middle and a heading marking one group as belonging to a particular class of workers or containers. The names (Sina-ili, En-ili, Annalum, Širi'a) are Semitic, a snapshot of the ordinary people employed by the palace of Nabada. Broken at the top and worn, it is the plainest kind of bureaucratic paperwork, and precisely for that reason a direct trace of daily administration in a small Early Dynastic city.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A ration or allotment list. The opening entries are broken, but what survives credits one unit each to a series of men: Nir-amdu, Sina-ili (amount lost), En-ili, and one A-ru-[...]. A line then labels this group as belonging to the [GA2×SILA3] category, and a subtotal of five barig of grain is recorded. Three more men follow with one unit apiece — Širi'a, Si-um, and Annalum. The top of the tablet and several signs are lost to breakage and surface wear.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 1 (unit) [...]-u-[...] Nir-amdu(?) — 1 (unit) Sina-ili — [...] En-ili — 1 (unit) A-ru-[...] of (ša) the |GA2×SILA3|-|GA2×SILA3| (workers/vessels?) 5 barig Širi'a — 1 (unit) Si-um — 1 (unit) Annalum — 1 (unit)
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
[...] 1(asz@c) [...]-u2-[...] nir-am6-du#? 1(asz@c) si-na-i3-li# [...] en-i3-li 1(asz@c) a-ru#-[...] sza |GA2xSILA3|-|GA2xSILA3| 5(barig@c) szi-ri2-a 1(asz@c) si#-um 1(asz@c) an-na-lum 1(asz@c)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 055. 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 (P227234) — 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.