Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 103
About this tablet
A small round accounting tablet from Tell Beydar in northeastern Syria — ancient Nabada — written around 2400 BCE, in the Early Dynastic period. It records the wool clip: five entries of roughly a hundred units each, credited to or handled by a man with a Semitic name, A'šalum, followed by a short note on a separate grade of wool described as 'clean.' Documents like this are the bookkeeping of a palace textile economy, where wool was the region's great convertible wealth, and they show Sumerian-style numerals and signs being used by scribes whose own language was Semitic.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Wool account — shearing. Under A'šalum: 100, [100], 100, 100, and 63 units. Separately, three units of bar-ASZ-grade wool, clean. The tally comes to 463 units of the main lot, entered in five batches; the last line adds a small quantity of a different, washed or picked grade. Several signs on the edges of the tablet are visible but not included in the edition.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineWool, plucked (shearing); (of/for) A'šalum: 1 gešʾ2 40 (= 100); [1 gešʾ2] 40 (= 100); 1 gešʾ2 40 (= 100); 1 gešʾ2 40 (= 100); 1 gešʾ2 3 (= 63); wool of the bar-ASZ (grade): 3, SIKIL (clean/pure).
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 'a3-sza-lum 1(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) [1(gesz2@c)] 4(u@c) 1(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) 1(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) 1(gesz2@c) 3(asz@c) siki bar-ASZ 3(asz@c) SIKIL
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 103. 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 (P227282) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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