Position in chronology
Shalmaneser III 039
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Shalmaneser (III), strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, son of Ashurnasirpal (II), king of Assyria, son of Tukultī-Ninurta (II), (who was) [also king of Assyria]; the conqueror from the Sea of the Naʾiri land(s) [to the Sea of Chaldea], which is called the Bitter Sea. I (lit. “he”) conquered [as far as] the Sea of the Setting Sun. I marched to Babylon (and) Borsippa (and) made sacrifices. (6b) At that time, the temple of the gods Anu (and) Adad, my lords, which previously Tiglath-pileser (I), son of Mutakkil-Nusku, <had built>, had become dilapidated (and), in its entirety, I…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
mdsál-ma-nu-MAŠ MAN dan-nu MAN KIŠ ⸢MAN KUR aš-šur⸣ DUMU aš-šur-PAP-A MAN KUR aš-šur / DUMU TUKUL-dMAŠ ⸢MAN⸣ [KUR aš-šur-ma] ka-šid TA tam-di ša KUR.na-i-ri / [a-di tam-di šá KUR.kal-di] ša? ÍD.mar-ra-te i-qa-bu-ši-ni / [a-di] ⸢tam⸣-di ša šùl-me dšam-ši ŠU-ti ik-šud / [a-na] ⸢URU⸣.KÁ.DINGIR.RA.KI URU.bár-sipa al-lik UDU.SISKUR.MEŠ / aq-qi ina u₄-me-šú-ma É da-nim dIŠKUR / <EN>.MEŠ-ia ša ina pa-an…
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 Q004644.
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/Q004644/..
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/Q004644/.
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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.