Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 094
About this tablet
A small clay administrative tablet from Tell Beydar — ancient Nabada — in the Khabur plains of northeastern Syria, written around 2400 BCE. It belongs to one of the oldest cuneiform archives ever found in Syria: the working paperwork of a small Early Dynastic city's palace, recording food offerings and the issue of young goats to named individuals, one animal at a time. The surface is badly eroded and the personal names survive only in fragments, but the format — a numeral, the word for 'kid', then a name — is instantly recognizable as livestock accounting. Tablets like this one show that literate bureaucracy had already spread far beyond southern Mesopotamia by the middle of the third millennium.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The opening lines list a quantity of food offerings, a blade or knife, and a reference to the ruler; a month or date and the name Be-lim follow, then the ruler is mentioned again before the text breaks off. The rest of the tablet is a short livestock tally: one kid goat charged to a man whose name ends in -rum, one kid goat to AN-ma-LUM, and one more kid goat whose recipient is lost. Several lines in between are broken or too worn to read, and the tablet ends mid-account.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse [n] food-offerings (nidba), gir2 (dagger/blade) — ak — the ruler (en); [month(?)]-sar: be-lim; [...] the ruler (en); [...] (broken) 1 kid (goat), [...]-rum2; [...] (broken) 1 kid (goat): AN-ma-LUM; (two illegible signs) 1 kid (goat) (the remainder of the tablet is broken away or too eroded 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
[n] nidba2# gir2# ak en [iti]-sar# be#-lim [...] en# [...] 1(asz@c) masz2# [...]-rum2# [...] 1(asz@c) masz2 AN-ma-LUM x x 1(asz@c) masz2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 094. 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 (P227273) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.