Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 078
About this tablet
A small cushion-shaped accounting tablet from Tell Beydar in northeastern Syria, written around 2400 BCE by a scribe of the local palace administration. It balances two categories of barley — grain set aside for sowing and grain issued as bread — and closes with a grand total labelled 'barley consumed.' Documents like this are how a Bronze Age Syrian household kept track of the difference between what it ate and what it had to hold back for next year's planting; the Beydar archive is one of the earliest bodies of writing in Semitic-language Syria, and it uses the Semitic word for 'hundred' (mi-at) alongside Sumerian capacity measures.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Seed grain, na-gar₃ type: 109 gur, 2 barig, 3 ban. Barley for bread: 103 gur, 8 barig, 4 ban. Grand total: 303 gur, 1 barig, 2 ban — grain consumed. (The stated total does not match the sum of the two entries as preserved, so either a third item has dropped out of the account or the hundreds were counted on a different reckoning than we assume.)
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineSeed barley (šeNUMUN), na-gar₃(-grain): 1 hundred 9 gur, 2 barig, 3 ban₂; bread(-barley) (ninda): 1 hundred 3 gur, 8 barig, 4 ban₂. Total: 3 hundred 3 gur, 1 barig, 2 ban₂ — barley consumed (šeGU₇).
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
sze NUMUN na-gar3 1(asz@c) mi-at 9(asz@c) gur 2(barig@c) 3(ban2@c) ninda 1(asz@c) mi-at 3(asz@c) gur 8(barig@c) 4(ban2@c) szu-nigin2 3(asz@c) mi-at 3(asz@c) gur 1(barig@c) 2(ban2@c) sze gu7
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 078. 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 (P227257) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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