Position in chronology
Shalmaneser III 006
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(i 1) The god Aššur, the great lord, the king of all of the great gods; the god Anu, the king of the Igīgū and Anunnakū gods; the lord of the lands, the god Enlil, the exalted one, the father of the gods, the creator of all; the god Ea, the king of the apsû, the lord of wisdom and understanding; the god Sîn, the king of the lunar disk, the lofty luminary; (i 5) god Šamaš, the exalted judge of heaven (and) netherworld, the lord of all; the god Ninurta, the strong and mighty one, the splendidly preeminent one of the gods; (and) the goddess Ištar, the mistress of war and battle whose game is…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Why it matters
Opens with a full divine witness list — Aššur through Ištar — placing Shalmaneser III's reign under the sanction of every major Assyrian and Babylonian deity, a formulaic legitimation device central to neo-Assyrian royal ideology.
Transliteration
daš-šur EN GAL-ú MAN gim-rat DINGIR.MEŠ GAL.MEŠ da-num MAN dí-gì-gì / ù da-nun-na-ki EN KUR.KUR dEN.LÍL MAḪ a-bu DINGIR.MEŠ ba-nu-ú DÙ-ma / dé-a LUGAL ZU.AB EN né-me-qi ḫa-si-sis / d30 MAN a-ge-e ša-qu-ú nam-ri-ri / dšá-maš DI.KU₅ AN-e KI-tim ša-qu-ú EN gim-ri / dMAŠ dan-dan-nu geš-ru SAG.KAL DINGIR.MEŠ ši-tar-ḫu / dINANNA be-lat MURUB₄ ù MÈ ša mi-lul-ta-ša GIŠ.LAL / DINGIR.MEŠ GAL.MEŠ mu-šim-mu…
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 Q004611.
Attribution
Image: BM — (British Museum, London, UK) — from Nineveh (mod. Kuyunjik) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P394809). 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/Q004611/.
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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.