Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 102
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic account tablet from Tell Beydar in northeastern Syria — ancient Nabada — written around 2400 BCE. The heading ties the record to a harvest of barley at the town wall, and the body lists round quantities (240, 200, 131, and so on) set against men with Semitic names: Tabla-alim, Arši-aḫu, Arrum, Kur-ilum. Beydar is one of the very few Early Dynastic archives found outside southern Iraq, and tablets like this one show a northern Syrian town keeping its grain books in cuneiform, with a local Semitic-speaking population, generations before the famous archive at Ebla was buried.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Under the supervision of (name lost): barley harvested at the town wall. The account then runs down a list of men and their amounts — 2 and 1 for Tabla-alim, 240 for Arši-aḫu, 200 for Arrum, then a figure in the hundreds plus 30 for a man whose name is broken away, 131 for Kur-ilum, and a final entry of 200 whose owner is lost with the rest of the tablet. Several of the commodity signs after the numbers are chipped off, so we cannot always say exactly what was being counted out.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineAt the disposal of(?) — the fortification wall: barley has been harvested. Ḫal-ti(?). 2 [units], 1 [unit] — [Tab]-la-a-lim. 240 [units] — Ar-ši-a-ḫu. 200 — Ar-rum. [n] hundred (and) 30 — [... (name lost)]. 131 [units] — Kur-i-[lum]. 2 hun[dred] — (remainder lost).
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
ki szu bad3 sze al-gur10-gur10 HAL-ti 2(asz@c) [x] 1(asz@c) [x] [tab]-la#-a-lim 2(asz@c) mi-at# 4(u@c) [x] ar-szi-a-hu 2(asz@c) mi-at ar-rum2 [n] mi#-at# 3(u@c) [...] 1(asz@c)# mi-at 3(u@c) 1(asz@c) [x] kur-i3-[lum] 2(asz@c) mi#-[at]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 102. 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 (P227281) — 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.