Position in chronology
Esarhaddon 065
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 4(1) Esarha[ddon, king of the world, king of Assyria]; son of Sennache[rib, king of the world (and) king of Assyria]; the one who (re)constructed [the temple of the god Aššur], (re)built [Esagil] (5) and Bab[ylon, ...], re[stored the shrines] of cult [centers], completed the rites and [...], (10) (and) (re)confirmed the sattukku offer[ings ... of] the [great] gods, [am] I.
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
maš-šur-PAP-... [...] / DUMU md30-PAP-... [...] / ba-nu-u ... [...] / e-piš ... [...] / u? KÁ? ... [...] / mu-... [...] / šá ma-... [...] / mu-⸢šak?-líl?⸣ / par-ṣi ù ... [...] / mu-kin sat-tuk?-... [...] / DINGIR.MEŠ ... [...] / a-[na-ku]
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Esarhaddon, edited by Erle Leichty (RINAP 4, 2011). ORACC text Q003294.
Attribution
Image: Created by Erle Leichty, and the Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) Project, 2011. Lemmatized by Jamie Novotny, 2010. The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/rinap/Q003294/..
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/Q003294/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.