Position in chronology
Ashurbanipal 251
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 5(1) For the god Asari, great lord, his lord: Ashurbanipal, king of the world (and) king of Assyria, son of Esarhaddon, king of the world, king of Assyria, (and) king of Babylon, for the sake of his life had constructed Etemenanki anew.
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 5 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
dasar-ri umun gal lugal-a-ni-ir mAN.ŠÁR-DÙ-A / lugal imin lugal ma-da aš-šur.KI dumu mAN.ŠÁR-PAP-AŠ / lugal imin lugal ma-da aš-šur.KI lugal TIN.TIR.KI1 / nam-ti-la-bi-šè é-temen-an-ki eš-šiš mu-na-dím
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Ashurbanipal or a late Sargonid successor, edited by Jamie Novotny & Joshua Jeffers (RINAP 5, 2018–). ORACC text Q008340.
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/Q008340/..
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/Q008340/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.