Position in chronology
Shalmaneser III 008
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Shalmaneser (III), king of all of the people, the ruler, vice-regent of (the god) Aššur, strong king, king of all (5) four quarters (of the world), sun(god) of all of the people, ruler of all of the lands, the king who is desired object of the gods, chosen of the god Enlil, (10) trustworthy appointee of (the god) Aššur, the attentive ruler who has seen remote and rugged regions, the who has trodden upon the mountain peaks in all of the highlands, the receiver of booty (and) tax from all (four) quarters (of the world), the one who opens paths above and below, at whose strong attack for…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
mdsál-ma-nu-MAŠ / MAN kiš-šat UN.MEŠ / NUN-ú ŠID aš-šur / MAN dan-nu MAN kúl-lat / kib-rat LÍMMU-i dšam-šu / kiš-šat UN.MEŠ / mur-te-du-ú ka-liš / KUR.KUR.MEŠ MAN ba-ʾi-it DINGIR.MEŠ / ni-šit IGI.II.MEŠ dBAD GÌR.NÍTA aš-šur / pit-qu-du NUN-ú / na-a-du a-me-ru du-ur-gi u šap-šá-qi mu-kab-bi-is / re-še-ti šá KUR-e ka-liš ḫur-šá-ni ma-ḫír GUN / igi-se₁₁ šá DÙ-ši-na UB.MEŠ mu-pat-tu-ú ṭu-da-a-te / šá…
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 Q004613.
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/Q004613/..
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/Q004613/.
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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.