Position in chronology
Ashurbanipal 057
Written in modern English
Ashurbanipal, king of the world and king of Assyria, records a feat from the royal hunt: he grabbed a wild lion — one born on the open steppe — by the tail, and then, by the authority of the gods Ninurta and Nergal who stood behind him, smashed its skull with the mace he was carrying.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 5(1) I, Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria, while (carrying out) my princely sport, seized a lion that was born in the steppe (lit. “of its plain”) by its tail and, through the command of the gods Ninurta (and) Nergal, the gods who support me, shattered its skull with the mace that was in my hand.
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 5 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na-ku mAN.ŠÁR-DÙ-A LUGAL ŠÚ LUGAL KUR AN.ŠÁR.KI / ina me-lul-ti NUN-ti-ia UR.MAḪ šá EDIN-šú ina KUN-šú aṣ-bat-ma / ina qí-bit dnin-urta dU.GUR DINGIR.MEŠ ti-ik-le-ia / ina GIŠ.ḫu-ut-pal-e ša ŠU.II-ia muḫ-ḫa-šu ⸢ú-lat⸣-ti
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Ashurbanipal or a late Sargonid successor, edited by Jamie Novotny & Joshua Jeffers (RINAP 5, 2018–). ORACC text Q003756.
Attribution
Image: Created by Jamie Novotny and Joshua Jeffers, 2015-18. Lemmatized by Jamie Novotny, 2015–16, 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/rinap/Q003756/..
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/Q003756/.
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The earliest historical document in human history.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.