Position in chronology
Sennacherib 039
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 3(1) Palace of Sennacherib, great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, king of the four quarters (of the world), favorite of the great gods: (7) The god Aššur, father of the gods, looked steadfastly upon me among all of the rulers and he made my weapons greater than (those of) all who sit on (royal) daises. (11) At that [time], the palace in the citadel of Nineveh, which the kings, my ancestors, had had constructed and whose site was too small; alongside of which the Tebilti River had flowed and which had shaken its base when its flood was in full spate: (17) I tore down that…
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 3 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
É.GAL / md30-PAP.MEŠ-SU / LUGAL ⸢GAL⸣ LUGAL dan-nu / LUGAL ⸢ŠÚ⸣ LUGAL KUR aš-šur.KI / LUGAL ⸢kib⸣-rat LÍMMU-tim / mi-gir DINGIR.MEŠ GAL.MEŠ / daš-šur ⸢AD⸣ DINGIR.MEŠ ina kul-lat / ma-li-ki ke-niš IGI.BAR-ni-ma / UGU ⸢gi⸣-mir a-šib pa-rak-ki / ú-⸢šar⸣-ba-a GIŠ.TUKUL.MEŠ-⸢ia⸣ / ⸢i⸣-na [u₄-me]-šu-ma É.GAL MURUB₄ ⸢URU⸣1 / ša URU.ni-na-a ša LUGAL.MEŠ-ni / AD.MEŠ-ia ú-še-pi-šu-ma / ⸢ṣu-uḫ⸣-ḫu-rat…
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Sennacherib, edited by A. Kirk Grayson & Jamie Novotny (RINAP 3, 2012–2014). ORACC text Q003513.
Attribution
Image: Created by A. Kirk Grayson, Jamie Novotny, and the Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) Project, 2014. Lemmatized by Jamie Novotny, 2013. The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/rinap/Q003513/..
Translation excerpted from Grayson, A.K. & Novotny, J. 2012–2014. The Royal Inscriptions of Sennacherib, King of Assyria (704–681 BC). RINAP 3. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/rinap3/Q003513/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.