Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 081
About this tablet
A small round clay tablet from Tell Beydar — ancient Nabada, in the Khabur plains of northeastern Syria — written about 2400 BCE by a palace accountant. It records an official journey: the ruler (the en) travelled and stayed three days, and the scribe tallied the donkeys of the transport team and the barley eaten as fodder and rations, down to the last measure. Beydar's archive is one of the very few Early Dynastic administrative collections from Syria rather than southern Iraq, and its obsessive bookkeeping of equids is our best window on how draught donkeys were fed and managed in a third-millennium northern city.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Dated to the new moon, under Beli-ZI. The ruler travelled out and remained three days. Animals on the account: seventeen donkeys belonging to the work team, plus two more donkeys. Fodder issued: three gur of barley less four ban. Further barley consumed: four ban, charged to Ḫa-NI.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineNew-moon day (u₄-sar) — Beli-ZI. The en (ruler) went (there). 3 days he stayed. Donkeys: 17 (of the) work-team. 2 donkeys. Barley consumed: 3 gur less 4 ban. Barley consumed: Ḫa-NI — 4 ban.
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
u4-sar be-li2-ZI en ba-gin 3(disz@t) u4 al-tusz ansze 1(u@c) 7(asz@c) erin2 2(asz@c) ansze sze gu7 3(asz@c) gur la2 4(ban2@c) sze gu7 ha-NI 4(ban2@c)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 081. 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 (P227260) — 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.