Position in chronology
Adad-nerari III 12
Written in modern English
This is the palace label of Adad-nārārī III, king of the world and king of Assyria, son of Šamšī-Adad V — himself king of the world and king of Assyria — and grandson of Shalmaneser III, king of Assyria. The inscription states that it belonged to the facing of the temple of the god Aššur, though the end of that phrase is partially broken.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Palace of Adad-nārārī (III), king of the world, king of Assyria, son of Šamšī-Adad (V), king of the world, king of Assyria, (and) son of Shalmaneser (III), king of Assyria: belonging to the facing [of the temple of (the god) Aššur].
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
É.GAL m10-ERIM.TÁḪ MAN ŠÚ MAN [KUR] ⸢AŠ⸣ / ⸢A⸣ mšam-⸢ši-10⸣ MAN KIŠ MAN ⸢KUR AŠ⸣ / ⸢A⸣ md⸢sál-ma-nu⸣-MAŠ MAN ⸢KUR AŠ⸣ / ⸢šá⸣ ki-si-⸢ir⸣-ti [šá É AŠ]
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 Q004760.
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/Q004760/..
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/Q004760/.
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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.