Position in chronology
Esarhaddon 066
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 4(1') [...] Esarhaddon, king of the world, kin[g of ...] son of Sennacher[ib ...] the one who (re)constructed the temple of (the god) Aššur, (re)[built ...] ... [...]
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
[...] daš-šur-PAP-AŠ MAN ŠÚ ⸢MAN⸣ [...] / [...] DUMU md30-PAP.MEŠ-⸢SU⸣ [...] / [...] ba-nu-u É aš-šur e-[piš ...] / [...] (traces) [...]
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Esarhaddon, edited by Erle Leichty (RINAP 4, 2011). ORACC text Q003295.
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/Q003295/..
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/Q003295/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.