Position in chronology
Esarhaddon 137
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 4(1) For the goddess Ištar of Uruk, lady of the lands: Esarhaddon, king of the world, king of Assyria, (5) governor of Babylon, (and) king of the four quarters, son of Sennacherib, king of the world (and) king of Assyria, descendant of Sargon (II), king of the world (and) (10) king of Ass[yria], renovated Eanna (“House of Heaven”), the temple of highest rank, for the sake of his life, and made (it) shine like daylight.
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
ana dINANNA UNUG.⸢KI⸣ / GAŠAN KUR.KUR.⸢RA⸣ / mAN.ŠÁR-PAP-AŠ / MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR aš-šur.KI / GÌR.NÍTA KÁ.⸢DIŠ⸣.KI / MAN kib-rat LÍMMU-ti / A m30-⸢ŠEŠ?⸣.MEŠ-SU1 / MAN ŠÚ MAN ⸢KUR⸣ aš-šur.KI / A mMAN-⸢GIN⸣ MAN ŠÚ / MAN ⸢KUR⸣ aš-[šur].⸢KI⸣ / ana TI-šú é-an-na / ⸢É⸣ d⸢a-nu-u-ti⸣ / ud-diš-ma GIM u₄-me ZÁLAG-ir
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Esarhaddon, edited by Erle Leichty (RINAP 4, 2011). ORACC text Q003366.
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/Q003366/..
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/Q003366/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.