Position in chronology
Adad-nerari III 2002
Written in modern English
The inscription opens with an extended hymn of praise to the god Nabû. He is the heroic and exalted son of Esagil's temple, the wise and magnificent heir of Nudimmud, whose command stands supreme over all others. He masters every art and craft, oversees heaven and the underworld alike, holds the tablet stylus as the supreme scribe, and shows both mercy and judgment — with the power to empty or repopulate entire lands as he sees fit. He is the beloved of Enlil, lord of lords, a might without rival — and then the text breaks off before the sentence is complete.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) To the god Nabû, the heroic (and) exalted one, the son of Esagil, the wise (and) splendid one, the mighty ruler, the heir of the god Nudimmud — whose command is supreme — the one who is skilled in the arts, the one who oversees all of heaven and netherworld, the expert in everything, the wise one who can write (lit. “holder of the tablet stylus”), the learned one of the scribal art(s), the merciful (and) judicious one (5) who has the power to depopulate (and) repopulate (a country), the beloved of the god Enlil — the lord of lords, whose might has no rival, without whom there can be no…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
a-na dAG da-pi-ni šá-qé-e DUMU é-sag-gíl IGI.GÁL šit-ra-ḫu / NUN kaš-ka-šu IBILA dnu-dím-mud šá qí-bit-su MAḪ-rat / ABGAL nik-la-a-ti pa-qid kiš-šat AN-e KI-tim mu-du-ú mim-ma MU-šú / rap-šá uz-ni ta-mì-iḫ GI ṭup-pi a-ḫi-zu šu-ka-mì re-me-nu-ú muš-ta-lu / šá šu-ud-du-ú šu-šú-bu ba-šu-ú it-ti-šú na-ra-am dBAD EN EN.MEŠ-e / ša la iš-šá-na-nu dan-nu-su šá ba-lu-uš-šu ina AN-e la iš-šá-ka-nu mil-ku /…
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 Q004782.
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/Q004782/..
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/Q004782/.
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