Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 105
About this tablet
A small clay tablet from Tell Beydar (ancient Nabada) in northeastern Syria, written about 2400 BCE, recording an incoming delivery of livestock to the palace or temple herds: 102 sheep, ten grass-fed lambs, and two goats, credited under a man whose name ends in -šum and dated to a month written "iti-sar," with a second official, Beli-ZI, named at the end. Beydar's archive is one of the very few Early Dynastic administrative corpora from Upper Mesopotamia, and its scribes mixed Sumerian bookkeeping signs with Semitic words — here the number "hundred" is written with the Semitic word mi'at rather than a Sumerian numeral. The everyday accounting of a northern Syrian town, kept in the same technical shorthand used a thousand kilometers to the south.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Livestock received: ewes, entered as a delivery on the account of ...-šum — one hundred and two head of sheep, ten lambs on pasture feed, and two she-goats. Recorded in the month of iti-sar; Beli-ZI. The back of the tablet was left blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineEwes (female sheep), delivery; account of (lit. "with/from"): |HIxDISZ|-šum; 1 hundred (and) 2 sheep; 10 grass-fed lambs; 2 she-goats (LAK020). Month: iti-sar. Beli-ZI. (Reverse: uninscribed.)
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
udu#-munus mu-kux(DU) asz2-de3# |HIxDISZ|-szum2 1(asz@c) mi-at# 2(asz@c) udu sila4 u2 1(u@c) 2(asz@c) LAK020 iti#-sar be-li2#-ZI
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 105. 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 (P227284) — 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.