Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

Ashurnasirpal II 061

~875 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·Q004515

About this tablet

This is a badly fragmented piece of a royal inscription of Ashurnasirpal II, the Assyrian king who ruled from around 883 to 859 BCE and made Kalḫu (modern Nimrud) his capital. The surviving phrases — a city name in the Lulumê region, a reference to the land of Zaban, border-setting, tribute, and the completion of works — are typical of the annalistic or building-inscription genre in which Assyrian kings recorded their military campaigns and construction projects. The fragment is too damaged to reconstruct a continuous narrative, but it clearly belongs to the tradition of royal self-glorification that Ashurnasirpal II practiced on a monumental scale. The museum number (TH. 1929.10.12.144 / 121135) indicates it was acquired in 1929, likely from excavations at one of the main Assyrian royal centres.

Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.

Written in modern English

The text is too broken at the beginning and end of every line to read as a continuous passage. What survives says, roughly: '... they established [something] ... my [troops/territories?] ... [the city of] Dūr-Lulumê ... north of the land of Zaban ... I reckoned [it] the border of my land ... tribute ... its labour obligations ... [he/I] completed [the work] ...' The rest is lost.

A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.

Translation — our engine

Our engine
Low confidence
[...] ... [...] [...] they established? ... [...] [...] my ...-s ... [...] [... city of] ⸢Dūr?⸣-Lulumê [...] [...] above/north of the land of Zaban ... [...] [...] the border of my land I counted/reckoned ... [...] [...] ... tribute ... [...] [...] its corvée/labor obligation ... [...] [...] he completed? [...] [...] ... [...]

Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.

Engine notes

read from photo
7 uncertain terms
  • GAR-nu-ta-aUncertain verb form; possibly šakānu-derived ('they established/set'), but the reading of the signs after GAR is unclear in both photo and transliteration.
  • URU.BÀD-lu-lu-ma-a-aTentatively read as the city name Dūr-Lullumê ('Fort of the Lullumu'), a settlement in the Zaban region attested in Neo-Assyrian annals; BÀD sign is marked as uncertain with a half-bracket in the transliteration.
  • el-la-an KUR.za-ban'Above/beyond the land of Zaban' — Zaban is a known geographical designation for territory along the Lower Zab river; 'elān' ('above, beyond') is a common directional marker in Assyrian royal geography.
  • mi-ṣir KUR-ia am-nu'The border of my land I reckoned/assigned' — miṣiru ('border, boundary') with manû ('to count, assign') is standard annalistic phrasing for demarcating conquered territory.
  • an-ḫu-suLikely anḫu ('toil, exhaustion, corvée-labour') with a 3rd-person singular suffix; could refer to the burden/tax imposed on a population or the hardship of a campaign.
  • ú-ša-ak-lilTentative Š-stem of kalālu or šuklulu ('to complete, to finish, to make perfect'); restoration in the transliteration is uncertain (marked with ?).
  • ma-da-tuStandard Akkadian for 'tribute' (madattu); well attested in Neo-Assyrian annals but the surrounding context is broken and the sign reading carries a half-bracket.
Reasoning ↓

The photograph shows a clay tablet broken into at least four or five joining and non-joining fragments, with museum accession labels visible on the reverse of one piece (BM 121135, TH 1929 10-12 144, indicating a British Museum acquisition from a 1929 Telul al-Hayyat or similar excavation lot). The obverse face (the large central fragment) displays multiple horizontal lines of cuneiform wedges; the surface is worn and partially eroded, with the upper left corner and right edge missing. Individual wedge-groups are visible but at this resolution I can confirm only the general presence of multi-sign sequences consistent with Neo-Assyrian script — I cannot independently read specific signs to cross-check the transliteration sign by sign. The scholarly transliteration's heavy use of brackets and half-brackets (⸢ ⸣) is consistent with the visible surface damage. The terms KUR (land), MEŠ (plural marker), and what may be a place-name sequence in the fourth line are plausible from the sign clusters visible under magnification, but cannot be verified with certainty from the photo alone. The thematic tags 'law' and 'mythology' in the catalog metadata appear anomalous for what reads as a typical annalistic fragment; this may reflect broad ORACC genre tagging or a cataloging error.

Generated by claude-sonnet-4-6 · prompt 2026-05-12/v4-interpretation · May 12, 2026 · 3552 in / 1150 out tokens

Why it matters

One of the surviving royal inscriptions of Ashurnasirpal II, whose annals collectively document the territorial expansion and brutal suppression campaigns that defined early Neo-Assyrian imperial statecraft.

Transliteration

[...] x [...] / [...] u? GAR-nu-ta-a x [...] / [...] x.MEŠ-ia ú-x [...] / [... URU].⸢BÀD?⸣-lu-lu-ma-a-a [...] / [...] el-<la>-an KUR.za-⸢ban⸣ x [...] / [... mi]-⸢ṣir⸣ KUR-ia ⸢am⸣-nu x [...] / [...] x ma-⸢da⸣-tu x [...] / [... an]-ḫu-su x [...] / [... ú]-⸢ša⸣-ak-[lil? ...] / [...] x [...]

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 Q004515.

Attribution

Image: BM 121135 (British Museum, London, UK) — from Nineveh (mod. Kuyunjik) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts, P422386). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-18/v5-modern-rendering).

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