5 TM.75.G.2346: Introduction

VAT 12593 was found in the city of Šuruppag which was a part of Sumeria. At the time VAT 12593 was produced, the Early Dynastic Period, Sumeria was a loose collection of independent city-states united by a common language and culture. TM.75.G.2346, pictured in Figure 4,^[1]  was produced during the same period as VAT 12593 in the city of Ebla. The tablet now resides in the National Museum of Syria, Idlib, Syria.

Ebla was the seat of the Eblaite Kingdom that largely fell within modern day Syria stretching from the Mediterranean to the upper Euphrates. The people of Ebla spoke a different language than Sumerian, now called Eblaite. However, the scribes of Ebla adopted Sumerian cuneiform. As you can see in Figure 4, TM.75.G.2346 also contains some of the numerals discussed in Chapter 4, and so the scribes of Ebla also borrowed numerals from Sumeria. However, rather than adopt the sexagesimal system used in Sumeria, Ebla kept its own decimal number system, which modern Assyriologists shorten to System D. Rather than adopt Sumerian numerals to have different meanings, they instead used their words for hundred, thousands, and ten-thousand along with the Sumerian System S numerals for one and ten. The full system is shown below in Table 4.

Table 4. The Eblaite symbols of System D.

Symbol	Name	Value
		half
		one
		ten
	mi-at	hundred
	li-im	thousand
	ri-ba	ten-thousand

TM.75.G.2346 also used cuneiform wedges to represent ones.

Proto-cuneiform	Cuneiform

Finally, Eblaite numerals also employed subtractive notation. Much like Roman numerals write 9 as IX, meaning 10-1. Eblaites used the word lal (less) to indicate subtraction. Thus 9 might be written as 10 lal 1, or symbolically as follows.

Numbers larger than a hundred could be expressed by writing the number of each base-ten unit. For example 2300 would be written as follows.

Other than numerals, TM.75.G.2346 contains three other Eblaite words that all relate to grains. We will consider the meaning of these words when we analyze TM.75.G.2346 in Chapter ?. For now, Activity 4 invites you to interpret the numerical content of TM.75.G.2346.