Position in chronology
Aššur-reša-iši I 1005
About this tablet
A tiny fragment of a royal inscription of Aššur-reša-iši I, king of Assyria in the late 12th century BCE. All that survives is the tail end of the standard curse formula that Assyrian kings appended to their building inscriptions: a threat against any future person who erases or alters the king's name and inscription. Such curses were the ancient equivalent of a copyright notice backed by divine enforcement, and their formulaic wording is what allows scholars to identify even scraps like this one.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only the closing threat of this inscription remains readable. It says, in effect: whoever tampers with my inscription or my name — may the gods curse him furiously with a terrible curse. Everything before this warning, presumably the king's titles and an account of his building work, is lost, and the lines themselves are badly broken, with only scattered words surviving.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse/body — only the final curse formula survives) [...] ... [...] [... (whoever) alters my inscription and] my [na]me [...] [... with a] grievous [curse], angri[ly (...)] [(...)] may (the gods) cur[se him ...]
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
[...] x [...] / [... mu-né-kír šiṭ-ri-ia ù šu?]-⸢mi⸣-ia [...] / [... er-ra-ta ma-ru?]-⸢ul?⸣-ta? ag-gi-[iš (...)] / [(...)] ⸢li?⸣-ru-[ru-šu? ...]
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 Q005917.
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/Q005917/..
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.