Position in chronology
Shalmaneser III 025
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Shalmaneser (III), great king, strong king, king of the world, unrivalled king, dragon, the weapon that destroys all (four) quarters (of the world), the commander of rulers everywhere, the one who has smashed all of (5) his enemies like a pot, the strong male, the merciless (and) unsparing one in battle; son of Ashurnasirpal (II), king of the world, king of Assyria, son of Tukultī-Ninurta (II), (who was) also king of the world and king of Assyria; (9b) the conqueror from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea, the lands Ḫatti, Luḫuti, Damascus, Lebanon, Que, Tabal, (and) Melid; the one who has…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
⸢mdsál-ma-nu⸣-[MAŠ] ⸢MAN GAL⸣ MAN dan-nu MAN KIŠ / MAN la šá-na-an ú-šúm-gal-lu / ka-šu-uš DÙ* kib-ra-a-te šá-pir / mal-ki.MEŠ šá* kúl-la-te šá kúl-la-at / na-ki-ri-šú ki-ma ḫa-aṣ-ba-te / ú-da-qi-qu NÍTA dan-nu la pa-du-ú / la ga-mil tu-qu-un-te A aš-šur-PAP-IBILA / MAN KIŠ MAN KUR aš-šur A GIŠ.tukul-ti-dnin-urta / MAN KIŠ MAN KUR aš-šur-ma ka-šid TA tam-di AN.TA / a-di tam-di KI.TA KUR.ḫat-ti…
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 Q004630.
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/Q004630/..
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/Q004630/.
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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.