Position in chronology
Tukulti-Ninurta I 19
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Tukultī-Ninurta (I), king of the world, strong king, king of Assyria, king of the four quarters (of the world), sun(god) of all of the people; son of Shalmaneser (I), king of Assyria; (and) son of Adad-nārārī (I), (who was) also king of Assyria. (3b) At that time, (as for) the ancient wall of my city, Aššur, which the kings who came before me had previously built, it had become dilapidated and old. I cleared away its dilapidated section(s). I renovated (and) restored that wall. (6b) A large moat, which no king who came before me had previously built: I dug a large moat around the wall.…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
dGIŠ.tukul-ti-dnin-urta MAN KIŠ MAN dan-nu MAN KUR aš-šur / MAN kib-rat 4-i dšam-šu kiš-šat UN.MEŠ A dsál-ma-nu-SAG / MAN KUR da-šur A 10-ERIM.TÁḪ MAN <<A>> KUR da-šur-ma e-nu-ma BÀD URU-ia da-šur / maḫ-ru-ú šá i-na pa-na MAN.MEŠ a-lik pa-ni-ia e-pu-šu e-na-aḫ-ma / la-be-ru-ú-ta il-lik an-ḫu-su ú-né-kir₆ BÀD šá-a-tu ud-di-iš / a-na áš-ri-šu ú-ter ḫi-ri-ṣa GAL-a šá i-na pa-na MAN.MEŠ a-lik…
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 Q005855.
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/Q005855/..
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/Q005855/.
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The earliest historical document in human history.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.