Position in chronology
Ashurbanipal 061
Written in modern English
Ashurbanipal is named as great king, strong king, king of the world, and king of Assyria — pious servant of the great gods, beloved of Aššur and Mullissu, chosen by Nabû and Marduk. He is described as guardian of divine secrets, diligent in his care of sanctuaries, a holy priest whose food offerings delight the gods of heaven and the underworld, and one who accumulates furnishings for the temples. Several lines in the middle are too damaged to translate. The legible text resumes with a first-person statement: he seated someone — a name or title is lost — in that person's own place, but the surface breaks off there.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 5(1) Ashurbanipal, great king, strong king, king of the world, king of As[syria], the pious servant, the one who reveres the great gods, beloved of the god Aššur and the goddess Mullissu, the one required by the gods Nabû and Marduk, the one who protects the secret knowledge of the great gods, (5) the one who is assiduous towards san[ctuari]es, the holy priest whose gi[ving of food off]erings the gods of heaven (and) netherworld enj[oy], the one who ... Ešarra, the one who am[a]sses te[mple] appurtenance(s), (8) (No translation possible) (13) [I] made (him) t[ake] his seat in [his] (own)…
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 5 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
maš-šur-DÙ-A MAN GAL MAN KAL MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR aš-[šur] / ⸢re-e⸣-šú mut-nen-nu-u pa-liḫ DINGIR.MEŠ GAL.ME / ⸢na-ra-am daš-šur u⸣ dNIN.LÍL ḫi-šiḫ-ti / ⸢dMUATI u dAMAR⸣.UTU na-ṣir AD.ḪAL DINGIR.ME GAL.ME / muš-te₉-⸢eʾ-ú áš?⸣-[re?]-⸢e⸣ SANGA KÙ / šá ⸢na⸣-[dan zi]-bi-šú i-⸢ra⸣-[mu] DINGIR.ME šu-ut AN ⸢KI⸣ / mu-x [x] x ⸢é⸣-šár-ra mu-⸢na⸣-ki-mu si-mat ⸢É?⸣.[KUR?] / x [x x] x [x] x x x [x] x MUNUS.SIG₅ / I…
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Ashurbanipal or a late Sargonid successor, edited by Jamie Novotny & Joshua Jeffers (RINAP 5, 2018–). ORACC text Q003760.
Attribution
Image: Created by Jamie Novotny and Joshua Jeffers, 2015-18. Lemmatized by Jamie Novotny, 2017, 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/Q003760/..
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/Q003760/.
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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.