Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

Adad-narari I 22

~1300 BCE·Middle Assyrian·Q005759

Written in modern English

Adad-narari saw that the land around the city of Taidu was deserted and unfarmed, so he surveyed the ground, laid out a new palace, and built it from its foundations up to its battlements. He buried commemorative inscriptions inside the walls. He asks that any future ruler who finds the palace in disrepair should restore it and put his inscribed name back in its proper place — and if that ruler does so, the god Aššur will hear his prayers.

A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.

Translation — scholar edition

RIAo
High confidence
(55) When I saw the deserted (and) uncultivated areas of ... the city Ta[idu ...] ..., I delineated its area (and) founded a pala[ce insi]de it. I built (it) from its foundations to its crenellations. Moreover, I deposited my commemorative inscriptions (therein). (61) In the future, may a future ruler renovate its dilapidated section(s) (and) return my inscribed name to its place. (The god) A[ššur] will (then) listen to his [p]rayers.

Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).

Transliteration

URU.⸢ta⸣-i-[da? (x)] x-aḫ-ri ḫa-⸢ar⸣-bi / na-du-ti ŠÁ x x MA/KU? BE / a-mu-ur-⸢ma qa-qar⸣-šu ú-me-es-si / É.GAL-⸢la⸣ [i-na qé]-er-bi-šu ad-di / iš-tu uš-še-ša a-di gaba-dib-bi-ša / e-pu-uš ù na-re-ia aš-ku-un / a-na ar-⸢ka⸣-at UD.MEŠ / ru-bu-ú ar-ku-ú / an-ḫu*-sa lu-di-iš šu-mi šá-aṭ-ra / ⸢a-na⸣ aš-ri-šu lu-te-er / ⸢aš⸣-[šur] ⸢ik⸣-ri-be-šu i-še-em-me

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 Q005759.

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/Q005759/..
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/Q005759/.

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