Position in chronology
Tiglath-pileser I 03
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) [Tiglath]-pileser (I), strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, king of all four quarters (of the world), the valiant man who acts with the support of the gods Aššur and Ninurta — the great gods, his lords — (and thereby) has struck down his foes; (5) Son of Aššur-rēša-iši (I), king of the world, king of Assyria, son of Mutakkil-Nusku, (who was) also king of the world (and) king of Assyria. (6) By the command of the god Aššur, my lord, I conquered from the other side of the Lower Zab to the Upper Sea of the Setting Sun. I marched to the Naʾiri lands three times (and) conquered the…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
[mGIŠ.tukul]-⸢ti⸣-IBILA-é-šár-ra MAN KAL MAN KIŠ MAN KUR aš-šur / ⸢MAN⸣ kúl-lat kib-rat 4-i eṭ-lu qar-du ša i-na GIŠ.tukul-ti da-šur / ù dnin-urta DINGIR.MEŠ GAL.MEŠ EN.MEŠ-šu it-tal-la-ku / ú-šam-qi-tu ge-ri-šu / DUMU da-šur-SAG-i-ši MAN KIŠ MAN KUR ⸢da-šur⸣ DUMU mu-ták-kil-dnusku MAN KIŠ MAN KUR da-šur-ma / i-na siq-ri da-šur EN-ia iš-tu e-[ber]-⸢ta⸣-an / ÍD.za-be-šu-pa-li-i a-di A.⸢AB.BA…
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 Q005928.
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/Q005928/..
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/Q005928/.
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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.