Position in chronology
Tukulti-Ninurta I 1002
About this tablet
A badly broken royal building inscription of Tukulti-Ninurta I, king of Assyria in the 13th century BCE. Only formulaic scraps survive, but they are unmistakable: the king records that a temple built by an earlier ruler had fallen into decay, that he rebuilt it from foundation to parapet, and that he deposited his inscription in the structure with a blessing for any future king who would restore it again. Such texts were buried in the walls and foundations of buildings at Aššur — a message aimed as much at posterity as at the gods.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only fragments remain, but the message follows a familiar royal script: a king who reigned before me built this temple; over time it decayed and grew old. I rebuilt it completely, from its foundations up to its parapets, making it finer than it was before, and I placed my inscribed monument inside it. When in the future the building grows old again, may the ruler of that day restore it. The opening lines naming the king, the middle passage, and the closing blessing are all lost to damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Beginning broken) [...] a king who came be[fore me ...] [... the temple] had become dilapidated and o[ld ...] [...] ... (traces) [...] [... I rebuilt it from] its foundations to [its] crenel[lations ...] [... which] more than before I [made greater/more splendid ...] [... my monumental inscription] I deposited. To/For [...] [... when (that temple) again] becomes old and [dilapidated, may a future prince restore it ...] [...] ... (traces) [...] (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
[...] ⸢LUGAL⸣ a-lik pa-[ni-ia ...] / [...] e-na-aḫ-ma la-be-⸢ru⸣-[ta il-lik ...] / [...] x a ṣi ú [...] / [... iš-tu] ⸢uš⸣-še-e-šu a-di ⸢gaba⸣-[dib-bi-šu ...] / [... ša el] maḫ-ri-i ú-[...] / [... na-re-ia] aš-kun a-⸢na⸣ [...] / [... ú]-⸢šal⸣-ba-ru-ma [...] / [...] 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 Q005880.
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/Q005880/..
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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