Position in chronology
Aššur-bel-kala 2001
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) To the god Šamaš, the king of heaven and netherworld, [his] king: Tukultī-Mēr, the king of the land Ḫana, [son] of Ilī-iqīša, the king of the land Ḫana, dedicated (this object) for the well-being of his land and the protection of his reign.
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
[a]-na dUTU MAN AN u KI MAN?-[šú?] / [m]⸢GIŠ⸣.tukul-ti-me-er MAN KUR.ḫa-na / [DUMU] mDINGIR-NÍG.BA MAN KUR.ḫa-na / a-na ⸢SI?.SÁ?⸣ KUR-šú / u na-ṣa-ar BALA-šú / i-qí-iš
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 Q005996.
Attribution
Image: Based on A. Kirk Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC I (1114-859 BC) (RIMA 2), Toronto, 1991. Adapted by Jamie Novotny (2015-16) and lemmatized and updated by Nathan Morello (2016-17) for the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation-funded OIMEA Project 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/Q005996/..
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/Q005996/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.