Position in chronology
Esarhaddon 125
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 4(1) For the god Marduk, his lord: Esarhaddon, king of Assyria (and) king of Babylon, had baked bricks made anew for Eteme[nanki].
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
ana ⸢dAMAR.UTU EN⸣-šú AN.ŠÁR-⸢PAP⸣-AŠ MAN ⸢KUR? aš?-šur?⸣ / MAN ⸢KÁ⸣.DIŠ.DIŠ ⸢a-gur?-ri é?-te-me⸣-[en-an-ki] / eš-⸢šiš ú⸣-x (x) [(x)] x1
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Esarhaddon, edited by Erle Leichty (RINAP 4, 2011). ORACC text Q003354.
Attribution
Image: Created by Erle Leichty, Grant Frame, 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/Q003354/..
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/Q003354/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.