Position in chronology
Shalmaneser III 028
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Palace of Shalmaneser (III), king of all of the people, vice-regent of (the god) Aššur, son of Ashurnasirpal (II), appointee of the god Enlil, vice-regent of (the god) Aššur, son of Tukultī-Ninurta (II), (who was) also appointee of the god Enlil (and) vice-regent of (the god) Aššur; the desired one of the gods, the chosen of the god Enlil, the splendid vice-regent of (the god) Aššur, the attentive ruler who frequents the shrines of the gods inside Ešarra, the one who has seen remote (5) and rugged regions (and) who has trodden upon the mountain peaks in the highlands, the receiver of…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
⸢É⸣.GAL mdsál-ma-nu-MAŠ MAN kiš-šat UN.MEŠ NUN ŠID aš-šur A aš-šur-PAP-A / LÚ.GAR dBAD ŠID aš-šur A tukul-ti-dMAŠ LÚ.GAR dBAD ŠID aš-šur-ma MAN ba-ʾi-it / DINGIR.MEŠ ni-šit IGI.II.MEŠ dBAD iš-šá-ku aš-šur šur-ru-ḫu NUN na-aʾ-du / muš-te-ʾu-ú áš-rat DINGIR.MEŠ šá qé-reb é-šár-ra a-me-ru du-ur-gi / ù šap-šá-qí mu-kab-bi-is SAG.MEŠ šá KUR-e ḫur-šá-ni ma-⸢ḫír⸣ GUN / igi-se₁₁-e šá ka-liš UB.MEŠ…
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 Q004633.
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/Q004633/..
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/Q004633/.
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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.