Position in chronology
Adad-narari I 1002
About this tablet
A fragment of a royal building inscription of Adad-narari I, king of Assyria in the early 13th century BCE. The surviving lines belong to the standard closing formula of such texts: the king records that he rebuilt a structure 'from its foundations to its crenellations', then asks future rulers to restore his inscribed name to its place — promising the goddess Ištar's favour to those who comply and threatening the storm-god Adad's lightning against those who do not. Too damaged to say which building it commemorated, but the formulae match the king's other inscriptions closely.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only scraps of this text survive, but they follow a familiar pattern. The king says he rebuilt some structure completely, from the foundations up to the parapets, and mentions a palace. He then addresses future rulers: whoever restores his inscribed name to its proper place should have the goddess Ištar hear his prayers and stand by him; but whoever fails to do so — the curse breaks off just as the storm-god Adad is invoked to strike with a bolt of evil lightning. The beginnings and ends of all four lines are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Fragmentary; a single passage from a composite text) [... fro]m its foundations to [its] crene[llations ...] [...] its [...] I built. The palace to/for [...] [... may he return my] inscri[bed name] to its place. (Then) may the goddess Ištar [... his] praye[rs ...] [... may she(?) st]and [by him(?)]. (But if not,) may the god Adad with an evil lightning bolt [...]
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[... iš]-⸢tu⸣ uš-še-šu* a-di ⸢gaba⸣-[dib-bi-šu ...] / [...]-tu?-šu e-pu-uš É.GAL a-⸢na⸣ [...] / [... ša-aṭ]-⸢ra a⸣-na aš-ri-šu lu-te-er dINANNA ik-ri-⸢bi⸣-[šu ...] / [... iz]-⸢zi?⸣-iz dIŠKUR i-na be-ri-iq le-⸢mut⸣-[ti ...]
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 Q005788.
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/Q005788/..
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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