Position in chronology
Esarhaddon 2004
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 4Lacuna? (1') [...] king [... Zakūtu/Naqīʾa ... wi]fe ... [... Sennach]erib, king of the world, [king of Assyria, daughter-in-law of Sargon (II), king of the world, k]ing of [Assyria, mother of Esar]haddon, king of the world (and) king of [Assyria]; (6') [the gods Aššur, Sîn], Šamaš, Nabû, and Marduk, Ištar of Nineveh, (and) [Ištar of Arbela] glad[ly placed Esarha]ddon, my offspring, upon the throne of his father, [... whose] good ... [...] they made pre-[eminent ...] who marched [... from the] Upper [Sea] to the Low[er] Sea (and) who does not [have] an equal (therein); (and) who flattened his…
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
[...] ⸢LUGAL?⸣ [...]1 / [... MUNUS].É.GAL x [...] / [md30-PAP.MEŠ]-⸢SU⸣ LUGAL kiš-šá-⸢ti⸣ [LUGAL KUR aš-šur.KI] / [kal-lat mMAN-GI.NA LUGAL kiš-šá-ti] ⸢LUGAL⸣ KUR [KUR aš-šur.KI] / [AMA maš-šur]-⸢ŠEŠ⸣-SUM.NA LUGAL kiš-[šá]-ti LUGAL KUR [aš-šur.KI-ma] / [daš-šur d30] ⸢d⸣UTU dAG u dAMAR.UTU d15 šá NINA.KI ⸢d⸣[15 šá LÍMMU-DINGIR.KI] / [maš-šur-ŠEŠ]-SUM.NA DUMU ṣi-it lìb-bi-ia ina GIŠ.GU.ZA AD-šú…
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Esarhaddon, edited by Erle Leichty (RINAP 4, 2011). ORACC text Q003406.
Attribution
Image: Created by Erle Leichty, Jamie Novotny, and the Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) Project, 2011, 2017. Lemmatized by Jamie Novotny, 2010, and updated by him, 2017, for the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI), a corpus-building initiative funded by LMU Munich and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (through the establishment of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East) and based at the Historisches Seminar - Abteilung Alte Geschichte of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/rinap/Q003406/..
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/Q003406/.
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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.