Position in chronology
Tiglath-pileser I 15
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) With the aid of the gods Aššur, Šamaš, (and) Adad, the great gods, my lords, I, Tiglath-pileser (I), king of Assyria, son of Aššur-rēša-iši (I), king of Assyria, son of Mutakkil-Nusku, (who was) also king of Assyria, (I) the conqueror from the Great Sea of the land Amurru and the Sea of the Naʾiri land(s), (and) marched to the Naʾiri land(s) three times.
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
ina re-ṣu-te šá aš-šur / dUTU dIŠKUR DINGIR.MEŠ / GAL.MEŠ EN.MEŠ-a / ana-ku mtukul-ti-A-é-šár-ra / MAN KUR AŠ A mAŠ-SAG-i-ši / MAN KUR AŠ A mmu-tàk-kil-d⸢nusku⸣ / MAN KUR AŠ-ma ka-šid ⸢iš⸣-[tu?] / tam-di GAL-te šá KUR.a-mur-ri / u tam-di šá KUR.na-i-ri / 3-šú ana KUR.na-i-ri 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 Q005940.
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/Q005940/..
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/Q005940/.
Related tablets
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The earliest historical document in human history.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.