Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 135
About this tablet
A small bun-shaped clay tablet from Tell Beydar — ancient Nabada — in the Ḫabur region of northeastern Syria, written around 2400 BCE. It is a herding account: an official tallies rams, seventy sheep, twenty-seven lambs, eleven lambs that were slaughtered, a dozen animals of another caprine category, and twenty-one hides, with a personal name (Ir-e-UD…) heading the entry. Tablets like this come from the palace administration excavated at Beydar, one of the few Early Dynastic archives known from Syria rather than southern Iraq, and they show the same bookkeeping habits — ruled boxes, round number impressions, laconic totals — being used at the northern edge of the cuneiform world.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Livestock account under Ir-e-UD…: rams; seventy head of sheep; the next two entries are lost. Twenty-seven lambs. Eleven lambs slaughtered. Ten of something now unreadable. Twelve animals of another category (probably she-goats). One further line is broken away. Twenty-one hides. The rest of the tablet is too worn to recover.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[Male sheep] (rams). Ir-e-UD…[…]. […] sheep: 70. […] […] Lambs: 27. Lambs put to the knife (slaughtered): 11. … …: 10. LAK020 (she-goats?): 12. […] Hides: 21.
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
[udu]-nita ir3-e-UD# [x] [x] udu 1(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) [...] [...] sila4 2(u@c) 7(asz@c) sila4# gir2# ak# 1(u@c) 1(asz@c)# x x 1(u@c) LAK020 1(u@c) 2(asz@c) [...] kusz 2(u@c) 1(asz@c)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 135. 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 (P227314) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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Related sources
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