Position in chronology
Shalmaneser I 1007
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, the Assyrian king who consolidated Middle Assyrian power and reshaped the northern Mesopotamian political map around 1300 BCE.
Transliteration
[...] x tu x [...] / [...] ⸢uš⸣-ši-šu a-⸢di⸣ [...] / [...] x x ⸢du?⸣ [...]
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 Q005832.
Attribution
Image: BM 123524 (British Museum, London, UK) — from Nineveh (mod. Kuyunjik) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P422600). 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/Q005832/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.