Position in chronology
Adad-narari I 19
Written in modern English
The wall of the temple of the god Aššur — Adad-narari's lord — stood beside towers and contained a drainage opening, facing what had been an orchard. Floods had eaten away at it, and although earlier kings, his ancestors, had previously built or repaired it, the wall of baked brick and bitumen had fallen into disrepair. Adad-narari relaid its foundations in baked brick and bitumen, reinforced it from the foundations up to the battlements, and deposited his commemorative inscriptions there. Several passages in this section are too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(4'b) At [that time, (as for) the wall of the temple of the god Aššur], my lord, which is next to [the towers ...] in which there is a drainage opening, [which is before the orchards] of the upper ... [(...) which flood(s)] had eroded (and) which the kings, [my ancestors who came] before me, previously [... had] built, that wall, [which had been built with] baked brick and bitumen, [(...) had become] dilapidated. I built its foundations [with baked brick] and bitumen. [I ... and] strengthened [...] from its foundations to [its] crenella[tions]. I deposited my commemorative inscriptions and…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
e-[nu-ma] / [BÀD ša É daš-šur] EN-ia šá SUḪUR na-[ma-ri?] / [...] šá bi-i-bu i-na lìb-⸢bi⸣-[šu] / [ša pa-ni GIŠ.KIRI₆.MEŠ] šá IM e-le-⸢e⸣ / [... ša mi-lu it-ta]-⸢ab⸣-lu-uš-šu šá LUGAL.⸢MEŠ⸣ / [ab-bu-ia? a-lik] pa-ni-ia i-na ⸢pa-na⸣ / [e]-⸢pu⸣-šu BÀD šu-⸢ú⸣ / [ša i-na a]-gur-ri ù ku-up-ri / [(...) e-pu-šu (...)] / [e-na]-⸢aḫ⸣ uš-še-šu / [i-na a-gur-ri] ù ku-up-ri ar-ṣi-ip / [...] x iš-tu uš-še-šu…
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 Q005756.
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/Q005756/..
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/Q005756/.
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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.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.