Position in chronology
Shalmaneser I 1002
Not yet translated
This tablet is catalogued with its transliteration and photographed, but no published translation exists yet. Our translation engine works through the untranslated corpus every night, oldest first — this page will update the day its turn comes. If you are a specialist and can read it, we would love your help.
Why it matters
One of the surviving royal inscriptions of Shalmaneser I, whose reign marks the consolidation of Assyrian imperial ambition in the 13th century BCE — though this manuscript is too fragmentary for its specific content to be read.
Transliteration
[...] x [...] / [...] x su x [...] / [...] ⸢MAN?⸣ KALA? MAN KUR ⸢aš⸣-[šur ...] / [...] x e-na-aḫ [...] / [...] x ri di x tu [...] / [...] x ⸢lu⸣-ter dx [...] / [...] x [...]
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 Q005827.
Attribution
Image: BM 128194 (British Museum, London, UK) — from Nineveh (mod. Kuyunjik) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P422947). 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/Q005827/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.