Position in chronology
Shalmaneser III 105
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Palace of Shalmaneser (III), great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, son of Ashurnasirpal (II), king of the world, king of Assyria, son of Tukultī-Ninurta (II), (who was) also king of Assyria.
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Why it matters
A titulary inscription of Shalmaneser III anchoring three generations of Assyrian kingship — Tukultī-Ninurta II, Ashurnasirpal II, Shalmaneser III — in the legitimising chain of patrilineal succession central to neo-Assyrian royal ideology.
Transliteration
É.GAL mdsál-ma-nu-MAŠ MAN GAL MAN dan-nu / MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR AŠ A AŠ-PAP-A MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR AŠ / A TUKUL-MAŠ MAN KUR AŠ-ma
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 Q004710.
Attribution
Image: BM 090221 (British Museum, London, UK) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P427850). 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/Q004710/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.