Position in chronology
Aššur-uballiṭ I 4
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Aššur-uballiṭ, vice-regent of the god Aššur, son of Erība-Adad (I); Erība-Adad (I), vice-regent of the god Aššur, (was) the son of Aššur-bēl-nišēšu; Aššur-bēl-nišēšu, vice-regent of the god Aššur, (was) [the son] of Aššur-nārārī (II); Aššur-nārārī (II), [vice-regent of the god] Aššur, (r 1) I roofed (it) with beams and installed doors inside it. I renovated (and) restored it from its foundations to its crest. Moreover, I made the goddess Ištar-kudnittu, my lady, reside inside that temple. Furthermore, I deposited my clay cone (therein). (r 9) (When) a future ruler builds that temple when it becomes dilapidated, the deities Aššur, Adad, and Ištar-kudnittu will (then) listen to his prayers. Moreover, may he return my clay cone to its place.
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
mda-šur-TI.LA / ÉNSI da-šùr / DUMU i-ri-ba-dIŠKUR / mi-ri-ba-dIŠKUR / ÉNSI da-šùr / DUMU da-šùr-EN-ni-še-šu / [m]da-šùr-EN-ni-še-šu / ⸢ÉNSI⸣ da-šùr / [DUMU] ⸢d⸣a-šùr-né-ra-ri / [md]⸢a-šùr⸣-né-ra-ri / [ÉNSI d]⸢a-šùr⸣ / ⸢GIŠ⸣.ÙR.MEŠ ⸢ú-ṣa-li-il-ma⸣ / GIŠ.IG.MEŠ i-na lìb-bi-šu / aš-ku-un iš-tu uš-še-šu a-di ša-pa-ti-šu / ú-di-is-su a-na aš-ri-šu ú-te-er-šu / ù dINANNA-kud-ni-it-ta / be-el-ti i-na…
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 Q005722.
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/Q005722/..
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/Q005722/.
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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.