Position in chronology
Esarhaddon 132
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 4(1) For the god Enlil, divine lord of the lands: Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, king of Babylon, (and) king of the land of Sumer and Akkad, for the sake of his life enlarged Pukudadaga (5) in the courtyard of the god Enlil with baked bricks from a (ritually) pure kiln.
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na d50 dEN KUR.KUR.RE / mAN.ŠÁR-ŠEŠ-AŠ MAN KUR aš-šur.KI / MAN KÁ.DINGIR.RA.KI MAN KUR šu-me-ri / u URI.KI a-na TI-šú pú-⸢kù⸣-dadag-ga / KISAL dEN.LÍL.LÁ.KE₄ ina a-gur-ru / UDUN KÙ-tim ú-rab-bi
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Esarhaddon, edited by Erle Leichty (RINAP 4, 2011). ORACC text Q003361.
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/Q003361/..
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/Q003361/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.