Position in chronology
Tiglath-pileser I 21
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(12') Palace of Tiglath-pil[eser (I), ...] the Great Sea of the land [Amurru ...] ... [...]
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Why it matters
A fragmentary royal inscription of Tiglath-pileser I referencing the 'Great Sea of Amurru' (the Mediterranean) — one of the earliest Assyrian textual claims to have reached the western sea.
Transliteration
É.GAL mtukul-ti-⸢A⸣-[é-šár-ra ...] / A.AB.BA GAL-te šá KUR.[...] / ma-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 Q005946.
Attribution
Image: BM — (British Museum, London, UK) — from Nineveh (mod. Kuyunjik) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P394711). 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/Q005946/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.