Position in chronology
Ashurnasirpal II 002
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Palace of Ashurnasirpal (II), vice-regent of (the god) Aššur, chosen of the gods Enlil and Ninurta, beloved of the gods Anu and Dagān, destructive weapon of the great gods, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, son of Tukultī-Ninurta (II), great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, son of Adad-nārārī (II), (who was) also king of the world (and) king of Assyria; the valiant man who acts with the support of (the god) Aššur, his lord, and who has no rival among the rulers of the four quarters (of the world); marvelous shepherd, fearless in battle, mighty…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Why it matters
Preserves Ashurnasirpal II's titulary in full — the layered chain of divine election, genealogy, and universal kingship that legitimised Neo-Assyrian imperial ideology in the 9th century BCE.
Transliteration
É.GAL maš-šur-PAP-A ŠID aš-šur ni-šit dBAD u dMAŠ na-ra-am da-nim ù dda-gan ka-šu-uš DINGIR.MEŠ GAL.MEŠ MAN dan-nu MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR aš-šur / DUMU GISKIM-dnin-urta* MAN GAL-e MAN dan-ni MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR aš-šur DUMU 10-ERIM.TÁḪ MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR aš-šur-ma eṭ-lu qar-du šá ina GIŠ.tukul-ti aš-šur EN-šú DU.DU-ku-ma / ina mal-ki.MEŠ šá kib-rat LÍMMU-ta šá-nin-šú la-a TUKU-ú LÚ.SIPA tab-ra-te la a-di-ru…
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 Q004456.
Attribution
Image: SM 1897.01.001 (Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts, P405822). 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/Q004456/.
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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.