Position in chronology
Erišum I 02
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Eriš[um (I)], vice-regent of the god Aššur, son of Ilu-šūma, vice-regent of the god Aššur. (7) He built the temple (and) all of the temple area for the god Aššur, his lord, for his life, and the life of his city. (15) When I started the work, (when) my city was under my command, I made silver, gold, copper, tin, barley, and wool, as well as the payment of bran and straw, exempt from taxes. (26) I mixed ghee and honey into (the mortar of) every wall and (then) laid one layer of bricks. With the god Aššur, my lord, standing by me, I cleared houses from the Sheep Gate to the People’s Gate.…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
i-ri-⸢šum⸣ / ÉNSI / da-šùr / DUMU DINGIR-šu-ma / ÉNSI* / da-šùr / É gi-me-er-ti / i-sà-re / a-na da-šùr / be-lí-šu / a-na ba-la-ṭì-šu / ù ba-la-aṭ / a-li-šu / i-pu-uš / i-nu-me qá*-ti / a-na e*-ep-ší / a-dì-ú / a*-li a-na pí-a / ú-ší-ib-ma / a-du-ra-ar / KÙ.BABBAR KÙ.GI / URUDU AN.NA še-im / SÍK a-dì e-dá / tuḫ-ḫe ù pá-e / áš-ku-un / i-na mì-ma / i-ga-re / Ì.NUN ù LÀL / ú-ší-il-ma / ti-ib-kam /…
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 Q005622.
Attribution
Image: Based on A. Kirk Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Third and Second Millennia BC (to 1115 BC) (RIMA 1), Toronto, 1987. Adapted by Jamie Novotny (2015-16) and lemmatized and updated by Nathan Morello (2016) for the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI), a corpus-building initiative funded by LMU Munich and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (through the establishment of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East) and based 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/Q005622/..
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/Q005622/.
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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.