Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 121
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic account tablet from Tell Beydar (ancient Nabada) in northeastern Syria, written around 2350 BCE. It lists five men by name — Ḫalti, Tab-la-alim, Arši-aḫu, Arrum and Kur-ilum — and beside each the amount of grain measured out to him, reckoned in gur, barig and ban. The names are Semitic in form, a reminder that the palace bureaucracy of the upper Khabur region operated in a Semitic-speaking milieu while writing in the cuneiform system inherited from the south. The ink marks on the tablet ('2700-T 55' and an Arabic museum number) are modern excavation and inventory labels.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A grain ledger: Ḫalti gets 2 gur 3 barig (the first figure is partly broken, so it may have been more); Tab-la-alim, 5 gur; Arši-aḫu, 3 gur 4 barig; Arrum, 4 gur 3 barig plus a figure now lost; and Kur-ilum, 1 gur 3 barig 3 ban. Five names, five allotments — the kind of routine disbursement list a palace storehouse would keep. The beginning of the first line and the end of the fifth are damaged, so a couple of the numbers are incomplete.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[Ḫal]-ti: [n+]2 gur 3 barig (of grain). Tab-la-a-lim: 5 gur. Ar-ši-a-ḫu: 3 gur 4 barig. Ar-rum: 4 gur 3 barig [+ n]. kur(?) Kur-i-lum: 1 gur 3 barig 3 ban.
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
[HAL]-ti [n] 2(asz@c) gur 3(barig@c) tab#-la-a-lim 5(asz@c) gur ar-szi-a-hu 3(asz@c) gur 4(barig@c) ar#-rum2 4(asz@c) gur 3(barig@c) [n] kur#? kur-i3-lum 1(asz@c) gur 3(barig@c) 3(ban2@c)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 121. 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 (P227300) — 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.