Position in chronology
Esarhaddon 064
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 4(1) I, Esarhaddon, mighty king, king of the world, king of Assyria, [go]vernor [of] Bab[yl]on, king of Sumer and Akkad; the one who (re)constructed the temple of [the god Aššur], (re)built Esagil and Babylon, renewed the statues of the great gods; son of Senna[ch]erib, king of the world (and) king of Assyria; descendant of Sargon (II), king of Assyria — (5) [during] my [king]ship, when the god Aššur and the goddess Mullissu stretched out [their] protection [over me] and (when) the great gods called my name for lordship over the [land] and people, and (when) I made Ashurbanipal, the senior son of the king, enter the House of Succession, (it was) [at] that time, (that) I raised that terrace (and) built a palace for my royal residence on [it].
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na-ku ⸢m⸣aš-šur-⸢PAP⸣-AŠ MAN dan-nu MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR aš-šur / ⸢GÌR.NÍTA⸣ KÁ.[DINGIR].RA.KI MAN KUR EME.GI₇ u URI.⸢KI⸣ ba-⸢nu-u⸣ É [daš-šur] / ⸢e⸣-piš ⸢é⸣-sag-⸢gíl⸣ u KÁ.DINGIR.RA.KI mu-diš ṣa-lam DINGIR.MEŠ / ⸢GAL.MEŠ⸣ DUMU m30-⸢PAP⸣.MEŠ-SU MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR aš-šur.KI A mMAN-GIN MAN KUR aš-šur-ma / [ina MAN]-ti-ía šá AN.⸢ŠÁR⸣ u dNIN.LÍL ⸢GIŠ.MI-šu⸣-[nu UGU-ia]1 / it-ru-ṣu u DINGIR.MEŠ ⸢GAL.MEŠ⸣ a-na…
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Esarhaddon, edited by Erle Leichty (RINAP 4, 2011). ORACC text Q003293.
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/Q003293/..
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/Q003293/.
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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.