Position in chronology
SAA 02 006. Esarhaddon’s Succession Treaty (VTE)
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 2(i) Seal of the god Aššur, king of the gods, lord of the lands — not to be altered; seal of the great ruler, father of the gods — not to be disputed. (1) The treaty of Esarhaddon, (king of the world), king of Assyria, son of Sennacherib, (likewise king of the world), king of Assyria, with Humbareš, city-ruler of Nahšimarti (etc.), his sons, his grandsons, with all the Nahšimarteans (etc.), the men in his hands young and old, as many as there are from sunrise to sunset, all those over whom Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, exercises kingship and lordship, (with) you, your sons and your grandsons…
State Archives of Assyria, volume 2 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
NA₄.KIŠIB da-šur₄ LUGAL DINGIR-MEŠ / EN KUR.KUR ša la šu-un-né-e / NA₄.KIŠIB NUN-e GAL-e AD DINGIR-MEŠ / ša la pa-qa-a-ri / a-de-e ša maš-šur—PAB—AŠ MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR—aš-šur.<KI> / DUMU md30—PAB-MEŠ—SU MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR—aš-šur-<ma> / TAv mḫum-ba-re-eš LÚ.EN—URU URU.na-aḫ-ši-mar-ti / <TAv> DUMU-MEŠ-šú DUMU—DUMU-MEŠ-šú TAv URU.na-aḫ-ši-mar-ta-a.a / LÚ.ERIM-MEŠ ŠU.2-šú gab-bu TUR <u> GAL ma-la ba-šu-u /…
Scholarly note
Neo-Assyrian treaty or loyalty oath, edited by Simo Parpola & Kazuko Watanabe (SAA 2, 1988). Binding agreement invoking divine sanction. ORACC text Q009186.
Attribution
Image: Adapted from Simo Parpola and Kazuko Watanabe, Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths (State Archives of Assyria, 2), 1988. Lemmatised by Mikko Luukko, 2016, as part of the research programme of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair in the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East at LMU Munich (Karen Radner, Humboldt Professorship 2015). The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/saao/Q009186/..
Translation excerpted from Parpola, S. & Watanabe, K. 1988. Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths. SAA 2. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa02/Q009186/.
Related tablets
Related sources
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.