Position in chronology
Adad-narari I 08
Written in modern English
The quay wall facing the Tigris River — running from the Ea-šarru Gate at the upper city entrance down to the Tigris Gate at the lower city entrance — had crumbled over time, its limestone and baked brick eaten away by the water. Adad-narari repaired the entire facing with bitumen and baked brick, building it to a thickness of four and a half bricks, then backed it with limestone and mortar brought from the city of Ubasê. He placed his royal inscription inside the structure. The text breaks off at line 32, just as it begins a directive to future rulers.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(24) (As for) the facing (of the quay wall), which faces the (Tigris) River from the entrance of the upper city, at the Ea-šarru Gate, to the entrance of the lower city, at the Tigris Gate, which through the (action of the river’s) water had become dilapidated and whose limestone and baked brick flood(s) had eroded away, I repaired that facing using bitumen and baked brick. I made (it) the thickness of four and one half bricks. I faced the back of it using limestone and mortar from the city Ubasê. Moreover, I deposited my monumental inscription (therein). (32) In the future, may a future…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
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Transliteration
ki-si-ir-ta ša pa-ni ÍD ša iš-tu si-pi URU e-le-e / ša KÁ-dé-a-LUGAL a-di si-pi URU šap-le-e / ša KÁ-dIDIGNA ša i-na A.MEŠ e-na-ḫu-ma me-lu / a-na ša-a-šu pu-li-šu ù a-gur-ri-šu / it-bal-lu ki-si-ir-ta ša-a-ti iš-tu ku-up-ri / ù a-gur-ri ak-si-ir 4 1/2 a-gur-ri ú-ke-ber / i-na pi-li ù ep-ri ša URU.ú-ba-se-e ku-ta-li-šu / ak-si-ir ù na-re-ia aš-ku-un / a-na ar-ka-at UD.MEŠ ru-bu-ú ar-ku-ú /…
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 Q005745.
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/Q005745/..
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/Q005745/.
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