Position in chronology
Esarhaddon 106
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 4(i 1) Esarhaddon, king of the world, king of Assyria, governor of (i 5) Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, pious prince who reveres the gods Nabû and Marduk — (i 10) Before my time the great lord, the god Marduk, became angry, trembled (with rage), and was furious with Esagil (i 15) and Babylon; his [he]art was full of rage. Because of the wrath in his heart and his bad temper, Esagil and Babylon became a wasteland and turned into ruins. (i 27) Its (Babylon’s) gods and goddesses became frightened, abandoned their cellas, and went up to the heavens. The people living in it (Babylon) were…
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
AN.ŠÁR-ŠEŠ-SUM.NA / LUGAL kiš-šá-ti / LUGAL KUR aš-šur.KI / GÌR.NÍTA / KÁ.DINGIR.RA.KI / LUGAL KUR šu-me-ri / ù URI.KI / NUN na-a-du / pa-liḫ dAG u dAMAR.UTU1 / ul-la-nu-ú-a / EN GAL dAMAR.UTU2 / i-gu-ug / i-ru-um-ma / ⸢it-ti⸣ é-sag-gíl / ù KÁ.DINGIR.RA.KI / e-zi-iz ⸢lìb⸣-ba-šú / ze-nu-⸢te ir⸣-ši-šú / i-na ug-gat ŠÀ-šú / ù ṣa-ra-aḫ / ⸢ka⸣-bat-ti-šú / é-sag-gíl / ⸢ù⸣ KÁ.DINGIR.RA.KI / na-mu-tu /…
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Esarhaddon, edited by Erle Leichty (RINAP 4, 2011). ORACC text Q003335.
Attribution
Image: Created by Erle Leichty, Jamie Novotny, and the Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) Project, 2011, 2015-16. Lemmatized by Jamie Novotny, 2010, and updated by him, 2015-16, 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/Q003335/..
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/Q003335/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.