Position in chronology
Tiglath-pileser I 07
About this tablet
A badly broken fragment of a royal inscription of Tiglath-pileser I, king of Assyria around 1100 BCE. The few surviving words are telling: Babylon, the land of Karduniaš (the Kassite name for Babylonia), a boast of conquest, and a royal palace. This almost certainly commemorates the king's famous campaign south into Babylonia, when Assyrian forces sacked Babylon and burned the palaces of its king Marduk-nadin-aḫḫē — one of the great clashes between the two rival powers of Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only scraps survive of this text, but they tell of a military triumph. The king declares that he marched against a foreign land, reached the city of Babylon itself, and conquered the land of Karduniaš — Babylonia. He then did something to the enemy king's palace, most likely destroyed or burned it, and dealt with the people or possessions of the defeated. The rest of the lines are too broken to read; the inscription trails off into damage after a few final illegible traces.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] ... the land [...] [...] ... the city of Babylon [...] [... the land Kardu]niaš I indeed con[quered ...] [...] his palace I indeed [...] [...] their [...] in [...] [...] ... his/its [...] [...] ... [...] (remainder broken)
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
[...] x KUR.[...] / [...] x URU.KÁ.⸢DINGIR⸣.[RA.KI ...] / [... KUR.kar-du]-ni-áš lu ⸢ak⸣-[šud ...] / [...] ⸢É⸣.GAL-šu lu ⸢AK?⸣-[...] / [...]-šu-nu i-⸢na⸣ [...] / [...] x-⸢su⸣ [...] / [...] 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 Q005932.
Attribution
Image: Based on A. Kirk Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC I (1114-859 BC) (RIMA 2), Toronto, 1991. Adapted by Jamie Novotny (2015-16) and lemmatized and updated by Nathan Morello (2016-17) for the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation-funded OIMEA Project 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/Q005932/..
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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