Position in chronology
Esarhaddon 076
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 4(1) The god Aššur [...] great [god]s in its midst ... [...] lasting [...] ..., he was giving a command to Esarhaddon, ..., his chosen one, and he was ordering him. (5) He called his name for kingship to be the one who renovates Ešarra (and) makes (its) cult complete, (saying): “Build lof[ty] Ešarra, the dais of my desire (and) make its design artful like the stars (lit. “writing”) of the firmament.” (9) Esarhaddon, trusted ruler, the one who is (re)building the temple of (the god) Aššur, mustered the workmen of the god Aššur from all of the settlements (and) mustered the rulers of all (four)…
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
daš?-šur? [...] ⸢DINGIR⸣.MEŠ GAL.MEŠ / ina qer-bi-šú x [...] x da-ra-te / a-na maš-šur-PAP-MU x x [x x] x x ni-iš IGI.II.MEŠ-šú / ur-tu i-nam-din-šu-u-ma ú-ma-ʾa-<ar>-šu ṭè-e-mu? / a-na mu-di-iš é-šár-ra mu-šak-lil pel-lu-de-e / MU-šú it-ta-bi a-⸢na⸣ LUGAL-u-te / e-pu-uš é-šár-ra ṣi-i-⸢ru?⸣ BÁRA la-li-ia / ki-ma ši-ṭir bu-ru-um-me nu-uk-ki-la GIŠ.ḪUR.MEŠ-šú / maš-šur-PAP-MU iš-šak-ku pit-qu-du…
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Esarhaddon, edited by Erle Leichty (RINAP 4, 2011). ORACC text Q003305.
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/Q003305/..
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/Q003305/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.