Position in chronology
Shalmaneser III 1003
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) For the god Ḫallasua, his lord: Shalmaneser (III), vice-regent of (the god) Aššur, dedicated (this).
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Why it matters
Dedicatory inscription naming Ḫallasua as Shalmaneser III's personal lord — one of the few direct attestations of this otherwise obscure deity in the Assyrian royal corpus.
Transliteration
ana dḫal-la-- / su-a UMUN-šú / mdSILIM-MAŠ / ŠID aš-šur BA
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 Q004724.
Attribution
Image: BM 089907 (British Museum, London, UK) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P452081). source
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/Q004724/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.