Position in chronology
Shalmaneser I 1004
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1') (No translation warranted.)
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Why it matters
One of the surviving royal inscriptions of Shalmaneser I, attesting the commemorative and ideological self-presentation of the Middle Assyrian kings at the height of their imperial consolidation.
Transliteration
[...] (x) x [...] / [...]-šu-ma x [...] / [...] ⸢ik⸣-[ri]-⸢bi⸣-šu i-⸢še⸣-[em-me? ...] / [...] x-ti li-x EN x [...] / [...] UR [...]
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 Q005829.
Attribution
Image: BM 123453 (British Museum, London, UK) — from Nineveh (mod. Kuyunjik) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P357209). 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/Q005829/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.