Position in chronology
Tukulti-Ninurta I 14
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Tukultī-Ninurta (I), king of the world, strong king, king of Assyria, chosen of (the god) Aššur, vice-regent of (the god) Aššur, true shepherd, loved one of the goddess Ištar, subduer of the land Qutû to (its) full extent; son of Shalmaneser (I), vice-regent of (the god) Aššur; (and) son of Adad-nārārī (I), (who was) also vice-regent of (the god) Aššur. (9) At that time, (as for) the temple of the goddess Dinitu, my lady, which the kings who came before me had previously built, that temple had been dilapidated, crumbled, and in ruin since the reign of Adad-nārārī (I), the vice-regent of…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
mGIŠ.tukul-ti-dnin-urta / MAN KIŠ MAN dan-nu MAN KUR aš-šur / ni-šit aš-šur ŠID aš-šur / SIPA ki-nu na-mad dINANNA / mu-šék-níš KUR.qu-ti-i / a-di pa-aṭ gim-ri / A dsál-ma-nu-MAŠ ŠID aš-šur / A 10-ERIM.TÁḪ ŠID aš-šur-ma / u₄-ma É ddi-ni-te / NIN-ia šá i-na pa-na / MAN.MEŠ a-lik pa-ni-ia / e-pu-šu É šu-ú / iš-tu BALA.MEŠ m10-ERIM.TÁḪ / ŠID aš-šur a-bi-ia / e-na-aḫ-ma im-qut / iḫ-ṭa-bit i-na…
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 Q005850.
Attribution
Image: Based on A. Kirk Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Third and Second Millennia BC (to 1115 BC) (RIMA 1), Toronto, 1987. Adapted by Jamie Novotny (2015-16) and lemmatized and updated by Nathan Morello (2016) for the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI), a corpus-building initiative funded by LMU Munich and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (through the establishment of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East) and based 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/Q005850/..
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/Q005850/.
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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.