Position in chronology
Adad-narari I 49
About this tablet
A badly broken royal inscription of Adad-narari I, king of Assyria in the early 13th century BCE. Only the opening survives: the king's name and his genealogy — son of Arik-dīn-ili, grandson of Enlil-nārārī — followed by a reference to a building his father had constructed. It was almost certainly a building or restoration inscription from Aššur, the standard way Assyrian kings recorded their construction works and claimed continuity with their royal ancestors.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only the beginning of this text survives. It reads: 'Adad-narari, son of Arik-dīn-ili, grandson of Enlil-nārārī...' — the king introducing himself by his royal lineage, as Assyrian kings always did. The next lines are too damaged to read fully, but they mention something 'which Arik-dīn-ili had built' and then a 'house' or temple, so the king was evidently recording repair work on a building his father had put up. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(1) Adad-nārārī (I), [appointee of the god Enlil, vice-regent of (the god) Aššur ...], (2) son of Arik-[dīn-ili, appointee of the god Enlil, vice-regent of (the god) Aššur ...], (3) son of [Enlil-nārārī, (who was) also appointee of the god Enlil (and) vice-regent of (the god) Aššur ...]. (4) ... [...] (traces) (5) which/of ... [...] (traces) (6) that which Arik-[dīn-ili (...) had built(?)] (7) the house/temple [...] (text breaks off)
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
mdIŠKUR-[ERIM.TÁḪ ...] / DUMU GÍD-[DI-DINGIR ...] / ⸢DUMU⸣ d[BAD-ERIM.TÁḪ ...] / NAM x [...] / šá šá-x [...] / šá mGÍD-[DI-DINGIR (...) e-pu-šu?] / É [...]
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 Q005786.
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/Q005786/..
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.