Position in chronology
Subartu 12, 148
About this tablet
A small bun-shaped clay tablet from Tell Beydar in northeastern Syria — ancient Nabada — written around 2400 BCE, in the same Early Dynastic scribal tradition as Ebla and Mari. It is a short administrative memorandum: a food-offering, an item connected with the ruler, a date or account heading, and then two or three named people each associated with a young goat. Texts like this are the day-to-day bookkeeping of a small Syrian palace household, and the Beydar archive is one of the few places where we can watch that provincial administration at work. Several signs are worn or broken, so the names and the exact nature of the transaction cannot be fully recovered.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Offering account. One entry lists a dagger(?) made for — or belonging to — the ruler, under the heading 'iti-sar' and a further term now hard to read. Then the people: U-la-šum, charged with one kid; a daughter; Ašlum; and a man whose name begins AN-a-…-tum, with one kid. The back of the tablet was left blank, and a few signs on the front are too damaged to read with confidence.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. Food-offering (nidba); 2. dagger(?) — made(?) — for/of the ruler (en); 3. iti-sar, AN-SAG(?); 4. U-la-šum; 5. a kid (mašdaria/goat): 1; 6. female child (daughter); 7. Ašlum; 8. AN-a-[x]-tum; 9. 1 kid. Reverse: uninscribed. (Edges: no ancient writing; modern museum notations only.)
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
_nidba2_ _gir2 ak# en_ _iti-sar# an#-sag#_ u9-la-szum# _masz2_ 1(asz@c) _munus-dumu_ asz-lum AN-a-x-tum 1(asz@c) _masz2_
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 12, 148. 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 (P274121) — 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.