Position in chronology
Ashurbanipal 186
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1') [... I allowed ... to dw]ell (as safely) as if on a meadow [... te]rror in the steppe [...] ... well-being (5´) [... who] constantly [a]chieves his heart’s wish [...]s, birds, and fish. 7 lines that have been erased and smoothed over with traces of signs (1) I, Ashurbanipal, great king, strong k[ing], king of the world, king of Assyria, king of the four quarters (of the world); offspring of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, governor of Babylon, king of the land of Sumer and Akkad; descendant of Sennacherib, great king, strong king, king of the world, (who was) also king of Assyria — (4) (The…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Why it matters
Preserves Ashurbanipal's full titulature — 'king of the world, king of the four quarters' — within a royal inscription that also records deliberate erasure, attesting the scribal practice of revising official commemorative texts.
Transliteration
(erased line with traces of signs) / [... ú-šar]-⸢bi⸣-ṣa (erasure) par*-ga*-niš*(over ersaures)1 / [...] ⸢ḫur⸣-ba-ša ina EDIN / [...] x x šul-me2 / [...] ⸢it-ta⸣-na-al-⸢la⸣-ku bi-bil ŠÀ-šú / [...] x.MEŠ (erasure) MUŠEN.MEŠ u KU₆.MEŠ / a-na-ku mAN.ŠÁR-DÙ-A ⸢LUGAL GAL LUGAL⸣ dan-nu LUGAL ŠÚ LUGAL KUR AN.ŠÁR.KI LUGAL kib-rat LÍMMU-tim3 / È lìb-bi mAN.ŠÁR-PAP-AŠ LUGAL KUR ⸢AN.ŠÁR⸣.KI GÌR.NÍTA…
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 Q007594.
Attribution
Image: BM — (British Museum, London, UK) — from Nineveh (mod. Kuyunjik) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P394724). source
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/Q007594/.
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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.