Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

Adad-narari I 24

~1300 BCE·Middle Assyrian·Q005761

Written in modern English

The surviving lines describe construction work: earth was piled up, and the summit of a ziggurat was raised — though the opening lines are too damaged to give the full details. Adad-narari deposited his commemorative inscriptions there. The closing lines call on any future ruler, should the structure fall into disrepair, to restore those inscriptions and his name to their proper places; the very end of the text is lost.

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

Translation — scholar edition

RIAo
High confidence
(1') [...] time [...] its [he]ight, from [...] I piled up [ear]th. [...] the summit of the zi[ggurat ...] I deposited [m]y [commemorative inscriptions (therein)]. (4'b) [In the future, may a future ruler, when that ... becomes dilapidated, ... restore my commemorative inscriptions and] my inscribed name to their places. [...]

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

Transliteration

[...] ⸢u₄?-mi?⸣ [...] / [...] ⸢mu⸣-la-šu iš-tu [...] / [... e]-⸢pe⸣-ri áš?-pu-uk? SAG si-[qur-ra-ti? ...] / [... na-re]-⸢ia⸣ aš-ku-un ⸢a?⸣-[na? ar-kat UD.MEŠ? ...] / [...] šu-mì šaṭ-ra <a>-na ⸢áš⸣-[ri-šu-nu lu-te-er ...]

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 Q005761.

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/Q005761/..
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/Q005761/.

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