Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 065
About this tablet
A small clay account from Tell Beydar (ancient Nabada) in northeastern Syria, written around 2400 BCE. A palace scribe is tallying copper — measured in shekels — issued to or owed by three men with Semitic names: Tabla'alim, Arrum and Kur-ilum, together with single copper pins or awls. Beydar's archive is one of the very few Early Dynastic administrative collections from Upper Mesopotamia, and tablets like this one show how metal, still scarce and imported, was distributed person by person in a Syrian town far from the Sumerian south.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A short metal ledger. Tabla'alim is charged with 2 shekels of copper; Arrum with 4 shekels; and Kur-ilum with 2 shekels. In addition, one copper pin is entered after Arrum's line and another after Kur-ilum's. The reverse of the tablet was left essentially blank, and the few marks that survive at its top are too worn to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse (x) shekels of copper — Tabla'a-[lim]: 2. (x) shekels of [copper] — Arrum: 4. Copper pin(s): 1. (x) shekels of copper — [Kur]-ilum: 2. Copper pin(s): 1. (Reverse largely uninscribed / effaced; a few signs at the top of the left case, too damaged to read.)
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
gin2 uruda tab-la-a-[lim] 2(asz@c) gin2# [uruda] ar#-rum2 4(asz@c) bulug4 uruda 1(asz@c) gin2 uruda [kur]-i3#-lum# 2(asz@c)# bulug4 uruda 1(asz@c)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 065. 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 (P227244) — 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.