Position in chronology
Aššur-etel-ilāni 05
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 5(1) For [the god Enlil, lord of the la]nds, his [lord: Aššu]r-etel-ilāni, (5) his obedient [shephe]rd, who provides for Nippur, supporter of Ekur, mighty king, king of the four quarters (of the world), (re)built (10) Ekur, his beloved temple with baked bricks.
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 5 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
[den-líl] / [lugal kur]-⸢kur⸣-[ra] / [lugal-a]-ni-ir / [AN].⸢ŠÁR⸣-e-tel-lu₄-DINGIR.MEŠ / ⸢sipa⸣ še-ga-bi / ú-a nibru.KI* / sag-ús* é-kur-ra / lugal kalag-ga / lugal ub-da límmu-ba / é-kur-ra / é ki ág-gá-a-ni / sig₄ al-ùr-ra-ta / mu-un-na-dù
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Ashurbanipal or a late Sargonid successor, edited by Jamie Novotny & Joshua Jeffers (RINAP 5, 2018–). ORACC text Q003860.
Attribution
Image: Based on Grant Frame, Rulers of Babylonia: From the Second Dynasty of Isin to the End of Assyrian Domination (1157-612 BC) (RIMB 2; Toronto, 1995). Digitized, lemmatized, and updated by Alexa Bartelmus, 2015-16, for the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation-funded OIMEA Project 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/rinap/Q003860/..
Translation excerpted from Novotny, J. & Jeffers, J. 2018–. The Royal Inscriptions of Ashurbanipal (668–631 BC), Aššur-etel-ilāni (630–627 BC) and Sîn-šarra-iškun (626–612 BC), Kings of Assyria. RINAP 5. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/rinap5/Q003860/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.