Position in chronology
Arik-din-ili 1
Written in modern English
Arik-dīn-ili, strong king of Assyria, son of Enlil-nārārī and grandson of Aššur-uballiṭ I, built a new temple to the god Šamaš so that the harvests of his land would flourish. The site he chose had once been Šamaš's sacred high place, where the decisions of the land were handed down, but it had fallen into ruin — a mound of dirt surrounded by squatters' makeshift shrines that ordinary people had moved into and occupied. Arik-dīn-ili tore all of that down and laid the foundations of the new temple. The inscription breaks off there.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Arik-dīn-ili, strong king, king of Assyria, the one who built the temple of the god Šamaš — the exalted shrine — for posterity, son of Enlil-nārārī, king of Assyria, son of Aššur-uballiṭ (I), (who was) also king of Assyria. (14) When I planned to build that temple so that the harvest of my land might prosper, at the sanctuary of the god Šamaš, the high place where the decisions of the land had been previously made, but now it was becoming a mound of dirt and around it the “shrines” of the people, which they had taken and settled in, I destroyed (that sanctuary). I laid its foundation(s)…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
ma-ri-ik-de-en-DINGIR / LUGAL dan-nu / LUGAL KUR da-šur / ba-ni É d⸢UTU⸣ / É.AN.NA / ṣi-ri / a-na UD.MEŠ / ba-šu-ti / DUMU dAB-ERIM.TÁḪ / LUGAL KUR da-šur / DUMU da-šur-TI / LUGAL KUR / da-⸢šur⸣-ma / e-nu-ma / aš-šum e-šèr / ⸢BURU₁₄ KUR-ia⸣ / e-pe-eš₁₅ É / šá-a-tu ak-pu-dú / i-na BÁRA dUTU / aš-ri / šá-qí-i / šá i-na maḫ-ra / pu-ru-sú / ma-ti / a-šar-šu / i-da-nu / i-na-na / a-na / tub-ki / ù /…
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 Q005730.
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/Q005730/..
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/Q005730/.
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