Position in chronology
Esarhaddon 074
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 4(1) I, Aššur-etel-ilāni-mukīn-apli, king of the world, king of Assyria, son of Sennacherib, king of the world (and) king of Assyria, descendant of Sargon (II), king of the world (and) king of Assyria; the one who (re)constructed the temple of the god Aššur, (5) (re)built Esagil and Babylon, restored the shrines of cult centers, completed the rites, (and) (re)confirmed the offerings of the great gods; I am also the one who knows how to greatly revere the gods and goddesses of heaven and netherworld.
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na-ku maš-šur-e-tel-DINGIR.MEŠ-GIN-A / MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR AŠ A m30-PAP.ME-SU / MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR AŠ A mMAN-GIN MAN ŠÚ / MAN KUR AŠ-ma DÙ-u É AN.ŠÁR / DÙ-ìš é-sag-gíl u KÁ.DINGIR.KI / mu-ud-diš eš-re-e-ti / šá ma-ḫa-zi mu-šak-líl / par-ṣi mu-kin SÁ.DUG₄ / šá DINGIR.ME GAL.ME ana-ku-ma / šá pa-laḫ DINGIR.MEŠ u d15.MEŠ / šá AN-e u KI-ti ra-biš / mu-du-u
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Esarhaddon, edited by Erle Leichty (RINAP 4, 2011). ORACC text Q003303.
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/Q003303/..
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/Q003303/.
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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.