Position in chronology
Šamši-Adad I 1001
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(i' 1) ... [By] command of [the god] Enlil and [...] my attack [in Arra]pḫa [...] seventh day [...] and [I] sacrificed, ...] and (ii' 1) I entered his fortress. I kissed the feet of the god Adad, my lord, and reorganized that land. I installed my governors everywhere and, (at) the Festival of Heat, I sacrificed to the gods Šamaš and Adad, in Arrapḫa itself. (ii' 12) (In) Addaru (XII), on the twentieth day, I crossed the (Lower) Zab (Zaiba) and made a razzia in the land Qabra. I struck down the harvest of that land and, in the month Magrānum, I captured the fortified cities of the land Arbela…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
[x x]-⸢da?⸣-al-ma / [ina] qí-bi-it / [d]⸢EN⸣.LÍL-ma / [x x] x i-ti-⸢lam⸣ / [x x x] ⸢ti⸣-bi-ia / [ina ar-ra]-⸢ap⸣-ḫi-im.KI / [x x x x] ⸢UD⸣.7.KAM / [x x x x]-bi-ma / [x x lu] ⸢aq⸣-qí / [x x x x x]-⸢ma⸣ / a-na ⸢ke⸣-er-ḫi-šu e-ru-ub / še-pa dIŠKUR be-lí-ia / aš-ši-iq-ma / ma-⸢a-tam⸣ ša-a-ti / ⸢ú-táq⸣-qí-in / ša-ak-⸢ni⸣-ia / aš-⸢ta?⸣-ka-ma / i-si-in ḫu-um-ṭim / a-na dUTU ù dIŠKUR / i-na…
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 Q005657.
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/Q005657/..
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/Q005657/.
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The earliest historical document in human history.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.