Position in chronology
Esarhaddon 136
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 4(1) For the goddess Nanāya, queen of Uruk, great lady, his lady: (2) Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, governor of Babylon, king of the land of Sumer and Akkad; who is assiduous toward the sanctuaries of the great gods; the one who (re)constructed the temple of the god Aššur, (re)built Esagil and Babylon, (5) renovated Eanna, completed the sanctuaries of all of the cult centers, (and) constantly established appropriate procedures in them; the one who conquered from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea (and) the one who made all rulers submissive to him; son of Sennacherib, king of Assyria; descendant of…
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na dna-na-a šar-rat UNUG.KI GAŠAN GAL-ti GAŠAN-šú / mAN.ŠÁR-ŠEŠ-SUM.NA MAN KUR aš-šur GÌR.NÍTA KÁ.DINGIR.RA.KI / MAN KUR šu-me-ri u URI.KI muš-te-eʾ-u áš-rat DINGIR.ME GAL.ME / ba-nu-u É AN.ŠÁR e-piš é-sag-íl u KÁ.DINGIR.RA.KI / mu-ud-diš é-an-na mu-šak-líl eš-ret kul-lat ma-ḫa-zi / ša ina qer-bi-ši-na iš-tak-ka-nu si-ma-a-ti / ka-šid ul-tu tam-tim e-li-ti a-di tam-tim šap-li-ti / ša gi-mir…
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Esarhaddon, edited by Erle Leichty (RINAP 4, 2011). ORACC text Q003365.
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/Q003365/..
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/Q003365/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.