Position in chronology
Aššur-reša-iši I 1001
About this tablet
A shard of a royal inscription of Aššur-reša-iši I, king of Assyria in the twelfth century BCE and father of the famous Tiglath-pileser I. What survives is the standard opening fanfare — the king's titles, his claim to be beloved of the gods Aššur and Enlil, a conqueror of mountain lands — followed by the beginning of a building report about a city wall and gate. Such texts were buried in the very structures they commemorate, addressed as much to future kings as to contemporaries.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only fragments survive, but the shape is clear. The text opens with the king's titles: king of the universe, king of Assyria, beloved of the god Aššur, favored by Enlil, a valiant warrior who subdues the mountain lands and strikes down the enemies of Aššur. He identifies himself as vice-regent of Aššur and son of Mutakkil-Nusku. The inscription then turns to the actual occasion: work on the wall and great gate of a city — the city's name is lost — and something about their foundations. The final line is reduced to illegible traces.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(1) [... king] of the universe, king [of Assyria ...] (2) [...] beloved of Aššur, the god [...] (3) [... object of the fav]orable [glance (lit. 'lifting of the eyes')] of the god Enlil, valiant young man, who subd[ues ...] (4) [...] the mountain regions, who brings low the foe[s of Aššur ...] (5) [...] the mighty ... (line too broken to construe) [...] (6) [... vice-re]gent(?) of Aššur, son of Mutakkil-Nusku [...] (7) [...] the wall (and) the gate of the city [...] (8) [...] their foundations [...] (9) [...] (traces only) [...]
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
[... MAN] KIŠ MAN [KUR aš-šur ...] / [...] ⸢na⸣-ram aš-šur ⸢d⸣[...] / [... ni-iš IGI.II].⸢MEŠ?⸣ dBAD GURUŠ qar-du mu-⸢šék⸣-[niš? ...] / [...] ḫur-ša-ni mu-šem-qi-tu ⸢ge⸣-[er aš-šur ...] / [...] ⸢dan⸣-nu-te ig-ga la mi x [...] / [...] ⸢ŠID?⸣ aš-šur DUMU mu-tàk-kil-d⸢nusku⸣ [...] / [...] x ⸢BÀD⸣ KÁ.GAL ša URU.[...] / [...] x dan-na-si-⸢na⸣ [...] / [...] x x x [...]
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 Q005913.
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/Q005913/..
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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