Position in chronology
Adad-nerari III 2010
Written in modern English
The inscription opens with a roll call of the great gods: Aššur, supreme lord and king of the gods, who decrees all destinies; Anu, the mighty forefather of the divine assembly; Enlil, father of the gods and lord of the lands, who exalts kingship; Ea, the wise king of the apsû, who grants wisdom; Marduk, sage of the gods, master of omens and commander of all; Nabû, scribe of Esagil and keeper of the tablet of destinies, who settles disputes; and Sîn, the luminary of heaven and the underworld, lord of the lunar disk — at which point the surface breaks off mid-sentence.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) The god Aššur, the great lord, the king of the gods [who] decrees destinies; the god Anu, the mighty (and) foremost one, the ancestor of the great gods; the god Enlil, the father of the gods, the lord of the lands who makes kingship great; the god Ea, the wise one, the king of the apsû who grants wisdom; (5) the god Marduk, the sage of the gods, the lord of omens, the commander of all; the god Nabû, the scribe of Esagil, the possessor of the tablet of destinies of [the gods] who resolves differences; [the god] Sîn, the luminary [of heaven and netherworld], the lord of the lunar disk who…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
daš-šur EN GAL-u MAN DINGIR.MEŠ [mu]-⸢šim NAM⸣.MEŠ / da-nu geš-ru reš-tu-u za-ri DINGIR.MEŠ ⸢GAL⸣.MEŠ / dBAD a-bu DINGIR.MEŠ EN KUR.KUR.MEŠ mu-šar-bu-u MAN-ú-[ti] / dé-a er-šú MAN ABZU pe-tu-ú [GEŠTU].MEŠ / dAMAR.UTU ABGAL DINGIR.MEŠ EN te-re-te mu-[ma-ʾe]-⸢er⸣ gim-ri / dMUATI DUB.SAR é-sag-gíl a-ḫi-iz DUB-si-mat [DINGIR.MEŠ sa]-ni-qu mit-ḫur-ti [d]30 na-[an-nar AN? u KI?] / EN AGA mu-nam-mir…
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 Q004790.
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/Q004790/..
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/Q004790/.
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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.