Position in chronology
Esarhaddon 114
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 4(i 1) Esarhaddon, king of the world, king of Assyria, governor of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, pious prince, who reveres the gods Nabû and Marduk — (i 7) Before my time, in the reign of a previous king, bad omens occurred in Sumer and Akkad. (i 10) The people living there were answering each other yes (for) no (and) were telling lies. They put the[ir] hands on the possessions of Esagil, (i 15) the palace of the gods, and they sold the gold, sil[ver], (and) precious stones at market value to the land Elam. (i 19) The Enlil of the gods, the god Marduk, became angry and plotted evilly to…
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 EME.GI₇ ù URI.KI / NUN na-a-du pa-lìḫ1 / dAG ù dAMAR.UTU / ul-la-nu-ú-a ina BALA2 / LUGAL maḫ-re-e ina KUR EME.GI₇ / ù URI.KI it-tab-šá-a / Á.MEŠ ḪUL.MEŠ UN.MEŠ / a-šib lìb-bi-šu an-na / ul-⸢la a-ḫa-meš⸣ e-tap-pa-lu / i-dab-⸢bu-ba sur-ra⸣-a-⸢ti⸣ / a-⸢na NÍG.GA é-sag-íl⸣ / É.GAL DINGIR.⸢MEŠ⸣…
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Esarhaddon, edited by Erle Leichty (RINAP 4, 2011). ORACC text Q003343.
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/Q003343/..
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/Q003343/.
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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.