Position in chronology
Aššur-rem-nišešu 1002
About this tablet
A badly broken royal building inscription of an Assyrian ruler at the city of Aššur in the Middle Assyrian period (attributed to Aššur-rem-nišešu, mid-15th century BCE). Only the formulaic skeleton survives: the king's titles as vice-regent of the god Aššur, a claim to have rebuilt an earlier structure from foundation to top, the deposit of inscribed clay cones, and a blessing on any future prince who restores the work. Such texts were buried in walls precisely so later kings would find them — a message across generations that here, remarkably, still works.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What remains reads like this: '...vice-regent of the god Aššur, son of ..., also vice-regent of the god Aššur. The structure that earlier rulers built before me — I rebuilt it from its foundation to its top, and I set my inscribed clay cones in place. When, in days to come, it falls into disrepair, may a future prince rebuild it and put my cones back; then may the god answer his prayers.' The beginning naming the king, the building being restored, and the closing blessing are largely lost in the breaks, but the standard formula lets us follow the sense.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, fragmentary) [... Aššur-rêm-nišēšu(?),] vice-regent of the god Aššur, [son of ..., (who was) also] vice-regent of the god Aššur: [... (the wall/structure) which (rulers who came)] before had built — [from] its foundation to [its crest I (re)built], and the clay cones [I deposited(?)]. [May a] later [prince], in days [to come, when (it) becomes] dilapidated, rebuild (it); [may the god ... (and the god ...)] his prayers [...] [...] may he restore(?) [...]
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
[...] ⸢ÉNSI⸣ da-šùr / [...] ⸢ÉNSI⸣ da-šùr-ma / [...] ⸢pa⸣-na e-pu-šu / [iš-tu] ⸢SUḪUŠ⸣-šu a-dí / [ša-ap-ti-šu e-pu-uš] ⸢ù⸣ sí-⸢kà⸣-ti / [... ru-bu-ú ur]-⸢ku⸣-ú i-na ú-me / [... e-nu]-⸢ḫu⸣-ma e-pu-šu / [dx (ù dx)] ⸢ik⸣-ri-bi-šu / [...] ⸢lu?⸣-te?-[er]
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 Q005710.
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/Q005710/..
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.