Position in chronology
Esarhaddon 131
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 4(1) For the god Enlil, lord of the lands, his lord: Esarhaddon, king of the world, king of Assyria, (5) king of Babylon, (and) king of the land of Sumer and Akkad, son of Sennacherib, king of the world (and) king of Assyria, (10) descendant of Sargon (II), king of the world (and) king of Assyria, renovated Ekur, the temple of the god Enlil, my lord, and made its processional way shine like daylight.
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na d50 / EN KUR.KUR EN-šú / mAN.ŠÁR-PAP-AŠ / MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR aš-šur / MAN TIN.TIR.KI / MAN KUR šu-me-ri / ù URI.KI / A m30-PAP.ME-SU / MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR aš-šur / A mMAN-GIN MAN ŠÚ / MAN KUR aš-šur-ma / é-kur É d50 / EN-ía ud-diš-ma / tal-lak-ta-šú / ki-ma u₄-me ZÁLAG-ir
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Esarhaddon, edited by Erle Leichty (RINAP 4, 2011). ORACC text Q003360.
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/Q003360/..
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/Q003360/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.