Position in chronology
Esarhaddon 007
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 4(i' 1') [and its army; I put] to the sword [Išpakāia], a Scythian, [an ally who could not save himself]. (i' 3') [I plundered the land Bīt-Dakkūri, which is in Chaldea, an] enemy of Babylon. [I captured Šamaš-ibni, its king, a rogue] (and) outlaw, (i′ 5′) [who did not respect the oath of the lord of lords, who took away fields of the citizens] of Babylon [and Borsippa by force and turned (them) over to] himself. [Because I know the fear of the gods Bēl and Nabû, I returned those fields and entrusted (them) to the citizens of Baby]lon [and Borsippa. I placed Nabû-šallim, son of Ba]lāssu, [on…
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
[ù ERIM.ḪI.A-šú miš-pa-ka-a-a URU].⸢as-gu?⸣-za-⸢a-a⸣ / [kit-ru la mu-še-zi-bi-šú a-na-ar] ina GIŠ.TUKUL / [áš-lul KUR.É-mdak-ku-ri šá qé-reb KUR.kal-di a]-⸢a⸣-ab KÁ.DINGIR.KI1 / [ak-mu mdšá-maš-ib-ni LUGAL-šu is-ḫap-pu] ḫab-bi-lum / [la pa-li-ḫu zik-ri EN EN.EN šá A.ŠÀ.MEŠ DUMU].⸢ME?⸣ KÁ.DINGIR.KI / [ù bár-sipa.KI ina pa-rik-te it-ba-lu-u-ma ú-ter-ru] ⸢ra⸣-ma-nu-uš / [áš-šú ana-ku pu-luḫ-ti dEN u…
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Esarhaddon, edited by Erle Leichty (RINAP 4, 2011). ORACC text Q003236.
Attribution
Image: Created by Erle Leichty, Jamie Novotny, and the Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) Project, 2011, 2017. Lemmatized by Jamie Novotny, 2010, and updated by him, 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/Q003236/..
Translation excerpted from Leichty, E. 2011. The Royal Inscriptions of Esarhaddon, King of Assyria (680–669 BC). RINAP 4. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/rinap4/Q003236/.
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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.