Position in chronology
Shalmaneser III 023
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Shal[maneser] (III), great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, king of all of the people; the great <king> who has always acted mightily with the support of the gods Šamaš (and) Adad, the gods who support him, and they have put under [his control] the mighty mountains from sunrise to sunset; the fierce (and) merciless king who has gone after [his] enemies and victoriously swept over rivers and difficult mountains (leaving them) like ruin hill(s) left by the Deluge; (13b) son of Ashurnasirpal (II), king of Assyria, son of Tukultī-Ninurta (II), king of Assyria; the…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
md⸢sál⸣-[ma-nu-SAG] / MAN GAL MAN dan-nu / MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR aš-šur MAN / kiš-šat UN.MEŠ <MAN> GAL / ina re-ṣu-te šá dUTU dIŠKUR / DINGIR.MEŠ tik-le-šú le-ìš / DU.DU-ma KUR-e KAL.MEŠ TA / ṣi-it dUTU a-di e-reb / dšam-ši ú-šat-me-ḫa ana [ŠU.II-šú] MAN / ek-du la pa-du-u šá EGIR [za]-i-[ri-šu] / DU.DU-ma GIM ⸢DU₆⸣ a-bu-bi / ÍD.MEŠ KUR.MEŠ ⸢GIG⸣.MEŠ / u-kab-bi-sa ⸢šal⸣-ṭiš A AŠ-PAP-A / MAN KUR AŠ A…
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 Q004628.
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/Q004628/..
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/Q004628/.
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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.