Position in chronology
Adad-narari I 24
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(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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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.