Position in chronology
Subartu 12, 153
About this tablet
A small palace livestock account from Tell Beydar — ancient Nabada — a walled town in the Upper Khabur plains of northeastern Syria, written around 2400 BCE. A scribe is tallying the flocks of the palace: sheep due for shearing, rams, a hundred head, a hundred ewes, sixty more, and forty-six lambs raised on grass, all filed under a month heading. The word for 'hundred' (mi-at) is Semitic, not Sumerian — a reminder that the Beydar scribes used Sumerian cuneiform to write an early Semitic language of their own. Wool was the economic engine of these northern Syrian towns, and this is the paperwork behind it.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Palace flock register. Sheep to be shorn; rams; one hundred head; ewes, one hundred; sixty more; grass-fed lambs, forty-six. Filed under the month-heading of Utu. The individual entries add up to 306 animals, though the tablet gives no grand total — and the edges carry further signs that are too worn to read with confidence.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineSheep for shearing. Rams (male sheep). Palace. 1 hundred. Ewes: 1 hundred. 60. Grass-fed lambs: 46. Month: iti-sar, (of) Utu.
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
_udu ur4_ _udu-nita_ _e2-gal_ 1(asz@c) mi-at _munus-udu_ 1(asz@c) mi-at 1(gesz2@c) _u2 sila4_ 4(u) 6(asz@c) _iti-sar utu_
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 12, 153. 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 (P274126) — 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.