Position in chronology
Ashurnasirpal II 133
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Ashurnasirpal, appointee of the god Enlil, vice-regent of (the god) Aššur, son of Tukultī-Ninurta (II), appointee of the god Enlil, vice-regent of (the god) Aššur, son of Adad-nārārī (II), appointee of the god Enlil, vice-regent of (the god) Aššur: (3b) I completed the temple of the goddess Ištar of Nineveh, my lady, from its foundation(s) to its crenellations and (then) paved (its courtyard).
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
mAŠ-PAP-A GAR dBAD ŠID AŠ A mTUKUL-MAŠ / GAR dBAD ŠID AŠ A 10-ERIM.TÁḪ / GAR dBAD ŠID AŠ É dINANNA / šá URU.ni-na-a NIN-ia / TA UŠ₈-šú a-di gaba-dib-bi-šú / ⸢ú-šak-lil u ak-sir⸣
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 Q004587.
Attribution
Image: Based on A. Kirk Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC I (1114-859 BC) (RIMA 2), Toronto, 1991. Adapted by Jamie Novotny (2015-16) and lemmatized and updated by Nathan Morello (2016-17) for the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation-funded OIMEA Project 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/Q004587/..
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/Q004587/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.