Position in chronology
Shalmaneser I 1001
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1') (No translation warranted.)
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Why it matters
A royal inscription of Shalmaneser I (~1300 BCE), one of the textual witnesses documenting Assyrian kingship ideology at the moment the Middle Assyrian state was consolidating its imperial reach.
Transliteration
[...] x [...] / [...] ⸢li⸣-ir-ti-di-[...]
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 Q005826.
Attribution
Image: BM 128376 (British Museum, London, UK) — from Nineveh (mod. Kuyunjik) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts, P423124). source
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/Q005826/.
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Related sources
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The earliest historical document in human history.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.