Position in chronology
Subartu 12, 166
About this tablet
A small clay accounting tablet from Tell Beydar (ancient Nabada) in northeastern Syria, written around 2400 BCE in the Early Dynastic period. It is a flock tally: sheep set aside for shearing, rams, ewes numbering a hundred and thirty-nine, a single animal written with the archaic sign LAK020 (probably a goat), and fifty-three grass-fed lambs — one man, Aḫu-ṭāb, is credited with a single head. The name is Semitic, and the counting word for 'hundred' (mi-at) is Semitic too, a reminder that the scribes of this northern city wrote Sumerian signs while speaking an early Semitic language. The last line dates the account to a month named for the sun-god.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A livestock count. Sheep marked for shearing; rams; Aḫu-ṭāb credited with one head; ewes — one hundred and thirty-nine of them; one goat; and fifty-three lambs still on pasture feed. The record closes with the month date, a month named for the sun-god Utu, though the beginning of that line is broken. The left edge of the tablet is lost, so the heading of each entry has to be restored.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[sheep] (for) plucking/shearing [sheep], male (rams) Aḫu-ṭāb: 1 female sheep (ewes) 1 hundred 40 less 1 (= 39) 1 LAK020 (she-goat?) grass-fed lambs: 53 [month:] ... of Utu (Šamaš) (The left-hand edge of every line is broken away; the signs in brackets are restored. No separate reverse text is given in the transliteration beyond the closing date line.)
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#_ a#-hu-du10 1(asz@c) _munus-udu_ 1(asz@c) mi-at 4(u@c) la2 1(disz@t) 1(asz@c) LAK020 _sila4 u2_ 5(u@c) 3(asz@c) _[iti]-sar# []utu#_
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 12, 166. 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 (P274139) — 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.