Position in chronology
Tukulti-Ninurta II 13
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) [Palace of] Tukultī-Ninurta (II), strong [king], king of the world, king of Assyria, [son of Adad]-nārārī (II), king of the world, king of Assyria, [son of Aššur]-dān (II), (who was) also king of the world(and) king of Assyria.
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Why it matters
Royal titulary of Tukulti-Ninurta II naming three generations of Assyrian kings, anchoring the dynastic continuity claims that legitimised early Neo-Assyrian imperial expansion before Ashurnasirpal II.
Transliteration
[É.GAL] mGISKIM-dMAŠ / [MAN dan]-ni MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR AŠ / [A 10]-ERIM.TÁḪ MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR AŠ / [A mAŠ]-KAL-an MAN ŠÚ 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 Q006043.
Attribution
Image: BM 123461 (British Museum, London, UK) — from Nineveh (mod. Kuyunjik) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P422540). 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/Q006043/.
Related tablets
Related sources
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The earliest historical document in human history.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.