Position in chronology
Subartu 12, 158
About this tablet
A small clay tablet from Tell Beydar (ancient Nabada) in northeastern Syria, written about 2400 BCE — one of the flock-counts kept by the local palace administration. It tallies animals brought in for the wool-plucking season: rams and ewes in hundreds, plus goats and forty-three grass-fed lambs, all booked under a man named Lu-salim. The Beydar archive is one of the very few third-millennium administrative archives found in Syria rather than southern Iraq, and it shows Sumerian-style bookkeeping being used by scribes whose own language and names were Semitic — note the Semitic word mi-at, 'hundred', sitting inside an otherwise Sumerian ledger.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Flock register for the shearing season, charged to Lu-salim: rams, one hundred; ewes, one hundred; a further eighty-five head; three goats; and forty-three lambs kept on pasture. The closing line on the reverse gives the accounting period, the 'iti-sar of Utu' — either a month name or the heading of a monthly account.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse: Sheep for shearing; rams; Lu-salim. 1 hundred ewes. 1 hundred, 85; 3 LAK020 (caprines); grass-fed lambs: 43. Reverse: 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.
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Transliteration
_udu ur4_ _udu-nita_ lu-sa2-lim 1(asz@c) mi-at _munus-udu_ 1(asz@c) mi-at 1(gesz2@c) 2(u) 5(asz@c) 3(asz@c) LAK020 _sila4 u2_ 4(u) 3(asz@c) _iti-sar utu_
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 12, 158. 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 (P274131) — 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.