Position in chronology
Shalmaneser IV 2
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) The god Marduk, the great lord, the king of the gods who holds the circumference of heaven and netherworld, populates cities, establishes sanctuaries, (and) supervises all of the shrines of the gods; the god Nabû, the scribe of the gods who grasps the holy tablet stylus, carries the tablet of the destinies of the gods, provides for the Igīgū and Anunnakū gods, (and) continually gives food rations (and) thereby grants life; (5) the god Šamaš, the light of the lands, the judge of all of the cities, protector of the (four) quarters (of the world); the god Sîn, the luminary of heaven and…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
dAMAR.UTU EN GAL MAN DINGIR.MEŠ ta-mì-iḫ GÚR AN-e u KI-tim / mu-še-šib URU.URU mu-kin ma-ḫa-zi pa-qid eš-ret DINGIR.MEŠ DÙ.A.BI / dMUATI DUB.SAR DINGIR.MEŠ ṣa-bit GI-DUB KÙ na-ši DUB ši-mat DINGIR.MEŠ / a-še-ir dí-gì-gì u dGÉŠ.U mu-ta-din kur-me-ti qa-iš TI.LA / dUTU ZÁLAG KUR.KUR DI.KU₅ kiš-šat URU.URU AN.DÙL kib-ra-a-ti / d30 dŠEŠ.<KI> AN u KI na-ši SI.MEŠ MAḪ.MEŠ šá lit-bu-šú nam-ri-ri /…
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of an Assyrian king, published in the Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online project (RIAo). Translation reproduced from the ORACC edition. ORACC text Q006688.
Attribution
Image: Based on A. Kirk Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC II (858-745 BC) (RIMA 3), Toronto, 1996. Adapted by Jamie Novotny (2016) and lemmatized and updated by Nathan Morello (2016) 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/riao/Q006688/..
Translation excerpted from Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online (RIAo), Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; in association with the RINAP Project, University of Pennsylvania. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/riao/Q006688/.
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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.