Position in chronology
Subartu 02, 140
About this tablet
A small clay fragment from Tell Beydar in northeastern Syria — ancient Nabada — written about 2400 BCE, when the city was a regional centre under the kingdom of Nagar. It is a barley account: a few surviving entries record grain drawn by or through the city gate, the "house of the rope" (an institutional household), and a foreman of a gang of workers, followed on the reverse by a grand total of 205 gur. The scribe counted the hundreds with the Semitic word mi'at, a reminder that the clerks of Beydar spoke an early Semitic language while writing in Sumerian-derived cuneiform. Because the preserved entries add up to only a fraction of the total, most of the original ledger is lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Barley account. Issued as the RU-share: 5 barig. Charged to the gate: 1 gur 1 barig. Charged to the House of the Rope: 1 gur 1 barig. To the foreman of the lu₂-ĝeš-DU work-gang: 4 gur 3 barig. Grand total: 205 gur. The surviving entries account for only a small part of that total — the rest of the tablet, with the remaining line items, is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. Barley — RU(-share): 5 barig 2. Receipt (lit. "hand") of the gate: 1 (gur) 1 barig 3. Receipt (lit. "hand") of the E-eš (house of the rope): 1 (gur) 1 barig 4. Overseer of the lu₂-ĝeš-DU (workmen): 4 (gur) 3 barig Reverse 5. Grand total: 6. 2 hundred 7. (and) 5 gur
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
sze#-RU# 5(barig@c) szu ka2 1(asz@c) 1(barig@c) szu e2-esz2 1(asz@c) 1(barig@c) ugula lu2-gesz-DU 4(asz@c) 3(barig@c) szu-nigin2 2(asz@c) mi-at 5(asz@c) gur
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 02, 140. 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 (P227319) — 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.