Position in chronology
Subartu 12, 164
About this tablet
A small, hand-sized clay tablet from Tell Beydar (ancient Nabada) in the Khabur region of northeastern Syria, written around 2400 BCE by a palace scribe. It is a livestock account: sheep sorted by category — animals due for shearing, rams, ewes, grass-fed lambs — with running totals of over a hundred head, credited under a man with a Semitic name, 'A₃-šalum. The closing line gives a dating or accounting heading tied to the sun-god Utu/Šamaš. Tablets like this are the routine bookkeeping of one of the earliest known Syrian city administrations, and among the oldest documents in the world to use a Semitic language alongside Sumerian writing conventions.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A tally of sheep. Animals for shearing; rams; then the entry for 'A₃-šalum, twenty-odd head (the number is broken). Ewes: one hundred and five sheep. Grass-fed lambs: forty-plus, the rest of the figure lost. The record closes with the month or accounting heading associated with the sun-god Utu.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineSheared sheep (wool-plucked sheep). Rams. 'A₃-šalum. 20+ [...]. Ewes. 1 hundred, 5 sheep. Grass-fed lambs: 40+ [...]. Month(?) iti-sar of Utu (Šamaš).
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_ 'a3-sza-lum 2(u)# [...] _munus-udu_ 1(asz@c) mi-at 5(asz@c) _udu_ _sila4 u2_ 4(u)# [...] _iti-sar utu_
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 12, 164. 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 (P274137) — 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.