Position in chronology
Sennacherib 051
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 3(1) Palace of Sennacherib, great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria: pendû-stone, whose appearance is as finely granulated as mottled barley (and) which in the time of the kings, my ancestors, was considered valuable enough to be an amulet, made itself known to me at the foot of Mount Nipur. I had (it) fashioned into sphinxes and had (them) dragged into Nineveh.
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 3 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
É.GAL md30-PAP.MEŠ-SU MAN GAL / MAN dan-nu MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR aš-šur NA₄.dŠE.TIR / šá GIM ŠE.IM ṣa-aḫ-ḫa-ri ši-kin-šú / nu-us-su-qu ša ina tar-ṣi LUGAL.MEŠ / AD.MEŠ-ia ma-la NA₄ GÚ šu-qu-ru / i-na GÌR.II KUR.ni-pur KUR-i ra-ma-nu-uš / ud-dan-ni a-na MUNUS.ÁB.ZA.ZA-a-ti / ú-še-piš-ma ú-šal-di-da / qé-reb URU.ni-na-a
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Sennacherib, edited by A. Kirk Grayson & Jamie Novotny (RINAP 3, 2012–2014). ORACC text Q003525.
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/Q003525/..
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/Q003525/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.