Position in chronology
Adad-nerari III 14
Written in modern English
Adad-nerari III — son of Shamshi-Adad V, grandson of Shalmaneser III, each of them appointee of Enlil and vice-regent of Ashur — rebuilt the temple of Nabû, his lord, in Nineveh from its foundations to its battlements. He did this for his own life, the welfare of his descendants, and the good of his land.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Adad-nārārī (III), appointee of the god Enlil, vice-regent of (the god) Aššur, son of Šamšī-Adad (V), appointee of the god Enlil, vice-regent of (the god) Aššur, son of Shalmaneser (III), (who was) also appointee of the god Enlil and vice-regent of (the god) Aššur: (as for) the temple of the god Nabû, his lord, that is in Nineveh, he (re)built (it) from its foundation(s) to its crenellations for his life (and) the well-being of his seed and his land.
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Why it matters
Documents Adad-nērārī III's reconstruction of Nabû's Nineveh temple, anchoring the god's growing cult prominence in the Assyrian heartland to a datable early eighth-century royal patron.
Transliteration
m10-ERIM.TÁḪ GAR dBAD ŠID aš-šur / A mdUTU-ši-10 GAR dBAD ŠID aš-šur / A mdsál-ma-nu-MAŠ GAR dBAD ŠID aš-šur-ma / É dAG EN-šú šá qé-reb URU.ni-na-a / iš-tu UŠ₈-šú a-di gaba-dib-bi-šú / ana TI-šú šùl-mu NUMUN-šú u KUR-šú DÙ-uš
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 Q004762.
Attribution
Image: BM 137463 (British Museum, London, UK) — from Nineveh (mod. Kuyunjik) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts, P428785). source
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/Q004762/.
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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.