Position in chronology
Adad-narari I 10
Written in modern English
The wall of the New City, facing the Tigris and opposite the tisaru-district, had originally been built by Adad-narari's ancestor Puzur-Aššur III. By the time Adad-narari came to it, the wall was only two and a half bricks thick and thirty courses high, and floods had left it crumbling and ruined. He cleared the site, dug down to the foundation pit, and relaid the foundations on solid bedrock using a large brick mold that brought the new wall to a full ten bricks in thickness. He then rebuilt it from the foundations all the way up to the battlements. The text continues with a description of drainage sewers, but the passage breaks off before it is complete.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(35) At that time, (as for) the wall of the New City, which faces the (Tigris) River, which is opposite the tisaru-district, which Puzur-Aššur (III), my ancestor, a king who came before me, had previously built, it was two and one half bricks thick and thirty layers of brick high, had become dilapidated, was in ruin, and eroded by flood(s). I cleared its site (and) reached its foundation pit. I made (it) the thickness of ten bricks using my large brick mold. I laid its foundations on solid bedrock. I built (it) from its foundations to its crenellations. (44b) (As for) the sewers that drain…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
⸢e⸣-nu-ma BÀD URU-GIBIL ša pa-ni ÍD / ⸢ša⸣ tar*-ṣi ti-sa-ri / ⸢ša⸣ mpu-zur-da-šur₄ a-bi LUGAL a-lik pa-ni-ia / ⸢i-na⸣ pa-na e-pu-šu 2 1/2 SIG₄ ku-bar-šu / 30 ti-ib-ki mu-la-šu e-na-aḫ uḫ-da-bi-it / ù mi-⸢lu⸣ it-bal-šu a-šar-šu ú-né-ke-er / ⸢dan⸣-na-su ak-šu-ud 10 SIG₄ i-na na-al-ba-ni-⸢ia⸣ / ⸢GAL⸣-i ú-ke-be-er iš-di-šu i-na ki-⸢ṣi-ir⸣ KUR-i / ⸢dan⸣-ni lu ar-me iš-tu uš-⸢še-šu⸣ / [a]-⸢di⸣…
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of an Assyrian king, published in the Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online project (RIAo). Translation reproduced from the ORACC edition. ORACC text Q005747.
Attribution
Image: Based on A. Kirk Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Third and Second Millennia BC (to 1115 BC) (RIMA 1), Toronto, 1987. Adapted by Jamie Novotny (2015-16) and lemmatized and updated by Nathan Morello (2016) for the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI), a corpus-building initiative funded by LMU Munich and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (through the establishment of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East) and based at the Historisches Seminar - Abteilung Alte Geschichte of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/riao/Q005747/..
Translation excerpted from Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online (RIAo), Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; in association with the RINAP Project, University of Pennsylvania. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/riao/Q005747/.
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