Position in chronology
Tukulti-Ninurta I 23
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Tukultī-Ninurta (I), king of the world, strong king, king of Assyria, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters (of the world), chosen of the gods Aššur and Šamaš, am I, attentive ruler, the king (who is) the choice of the god Enlil, the one who shepherded his land in green pastures with his beneficent staff, foremost purification priest, designate of the god Anu, the one who with his fierce valor subdued rulers (and) all of the kings, true shepherd, desired of the god Ea, the one who has established in victory his names over the four quarters (of the world), exalted priest,…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
mGIŠ.tukul-ti-dnin-urta MAN KIŠ MAN dan-nu / MAN KUR daš-šur MAN KUR šu-me-ri ù ak-ka-di-i / MAN kib-rat 4-i ni-šit daš-šur / ù dšá-maš a-na-ku NUN-ú na-a-du / MAN ni-iš IGI.MEŠ dEN.LÍL / šá i-na šu-lum ši-be-er-šu / ir-te-ʾ-ú a-bu-riš KUR-su / i-ši-ip-pu re-eš₁₅-tu-ú / ni-bit da-nim šá i-na me-ziz / qar-ra-du-ti-šu ú-še-ek-ni-šu / NUN-e ka-al MAN.MEŠ re-iu-ú / ki-i-nu me-re-eš₁₅ lìb-bi dé-a / šá…
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 Q005859.
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/Q005859/..
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/Q005859/.
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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.