Position in chronology
Subartu 12, 207
About this tablet
Eight small fragments of a clay tablet from Tell Beydar (ancient Nabada) in northeastern Syria, written about 2400 BCE. What survives is a grain account: quantities measured in gur and barig set beside the names of two men with Semitic names, Bēlī-ZI and KUR-ilum, and a final total of 12. Beydar has produced one of the earliest archives from Syria, and even a broken ledger like this shows a palace or temple bureaucracy already tracking barley by named individuals in the same measuring system used far to the south in Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A grain ledger. Under a month heading, the scribe lists Bēlī-ZI with 7 gur, then KUR-ilum with 4 gur and 5 barig. The next entries are broken — one ends in -ḫa and is credited with 2 — and another name is lost entirely. The account closes with a figure of 12, presumably the running total. Most of the tablet is gone; only these numbers and two names can still be read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[Month:] Bēlī-ZI(?) 7 gur (of grain) KUR-ilum 4 gur 5 barig [...] ... [...] [...]-ḫa — 2 [...] ... 12 (gur)
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
[_iti/ud.sar_] be#-li2-ZI 7(asz@c) _gur_ _kur_-i3-lum 4(asz@c) 5(barig@c) _gur_ [...] x [...] [...]-ha# 2(disz@t) [...] x 1(u) 2(asz@c)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ebla (ca. 2350-2250 BC)) — Subartu 12, 207. 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 (P274183) — 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.