Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 082
About this tablet
A small round accounting tablet from Tell Beydar (ancient Nabada) in north-eastern Syria, written about 2400 BCE for the local palace. It records the annual wool clip, tallying the animals shorn by sex: two lots of 100 rams, then two lots of 100 ewes and a further 57 — 457 sheep in all — under the authority of the palace, and dated by a month name involving the sun-god Utu. Wool was the great industrial commodity of third-millennium Syria and Mesopotamia, and documents like this one are the bookkeeping behind that textile economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Wool shearing, palace account. Rams: 100, 100. Ewes: 100, 100, 57. Recorded in the month of Sar-Utu. In modern terms, this is a shearing tally sheet: the palace flocks were brought in, counted by sex, and booked in round hundreds with a remainder of fifty-seven — four hundred and fifty-seven head clipped in a single month.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[Wool] plucking (shearing): (of) rams — the palace: 100 100 Ewes: 100 100 57 Month: sar (of) Utu.
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] ur4 udu-nita e2-gal 1(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) 1(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) munus-udu 1(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) 1(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) 5(u@c) 7(asz@c) iti-sar utu
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 082. 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 (P227261) — 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.