Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 142
About this tablet
A broken clay tablet from Tell Beydar (ancient Nabada) in northeastern Syria, written around 2400 BCE. It is a headcount — a scribe tallying the men and the women (or wives) belonging to a series of households or work units, entry by entry, with a personal name attached to each group. Only scraps survive, but the pattern is unmistakable: the earliest bureaucracy of northern Mesopotamia keeping track of its people the same way it kept track of sheep and barley. The blue ink on the back is a modern excavation number.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a roster of people counted in small household groups: seven women; then a man named [...]-kium with one male; six more women; two entries too broken to read; someone whose name began with I- with one male; four women; a group under 'A3-da, marked 'second', with three or more men; and a final count of women whose number is lost. The rest of the tablet is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our enginewives(?): 7 [...]-ki-um: [n] 1 male wives(?): 6 [...] ...-IGI [...] I(?)-[...]: 1 male 4 wives(?) 'A3-da, second(?): 3 [n] males wives(?): [x]
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
dam# 7(asz@c) [...]-ki-um [n] 1(asz@c)-nita dam# 6(asz@c) [...] x-IGI# [...] i?-[...] 1(asz@c) nita# 4(asz@c) dam# 'a3-da min 3(asz@c) [n]-nita dam# [x]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 142. 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 (P227321) — 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
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.