Position in chronology
Adad-nerari III 01
Written in modern English
This is the palace of Adad-nārārī III — great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria — whom the god Aššur, king of the Igigū gods, chose and entrusted with unrivalled rule from his youth. He conquered and held dominion over everything from the Great Sea of the Rising Sun to the Great Sea of the Setting Sun. He was the son of Šamšī-Adad V, great and strong king of Assyria, grandson of Shalmaneser III, king of the four quarters of the world, who cut down all his enemies and swept them away like a flood. The lineage continues beyond that, but the text breaks off.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Palace of Adad-nārārī (III), great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, the king in whose youth (the god) Aššur, king of the Igīgū gods, chose and entrusted him with unrivalled rulership: he conquered and gained dominion over everything from the Great Sea of the Rising Sun to the Great Sea of the Setting Sun; (9b) son of Šamšī-Adad (V), great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, unrivalled king, (grand)son of Shalmaneser (III), king of the four quarters (of the world), who slew all of his enemies and annihilated (them) like a flood, (great) grandson of…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
É.GAL m10-ERIM.TÁḪ MAN GAL MAN dan-nu / MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR AŠ MAN šá ina TUR-šú aš-šur / MAN dí-gì-gì ut-tu-šú-ma mal-kut / la šá-na-an ú-mal-lu-ú / qa-tuš-šú TA tam-tim GAL-ti / šá KUR-ḫa dUTU-ši a-di tam-tim / GAL-ti šá šùl-mu dUTU-ši / qat-su KUR-ma i-pe-lu-ma / DÙ gim-ri A mdUTU-ši-10 / MAN GAL MAN dan-nu MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR AŠ / MAN la šá-na-an A mdsál-ma-nu-MAŠ / MAN kib-rat LÍMMU-ti šá kul-lat…
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 Q004749.
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/Q004749/..
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/Q004749/.
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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.