Position in chronology
Tukulti-Ninurta I 1004
About this tablet
A small surviving scrap of a royal inscription of Tukulti-Ninurta I, king of Assyria in the 13th century BCE. Only the edges of its lines remain, but the stock phrases are unmistakable: the king's name, his claim to be divinely chosen, boasts of defeating foreign lands and kings, and of forcing his way along paths no army had opened before. It is a fragment of the standard propaganda by which Assyrian kings advertised their conquests, matching better-preserved inscriptions of the same ruler.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only slivers of each line survive. The text names King Tukulti-Ninurta and calls him the one chosen by a god over the people. It speaks of kings who, from some point onward — the rest is lost — and hails him as the slayer of the land of Al[zu?], ruling out to the farthest border, a king who marched along roads never before opened. The final line preserves only illegible traces, and the rest of the inscription is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(1) [... Tukul]tī-Ninurta [...] (2) [...] the people, chosen of the god [...] (3) [...]s, the kings who from [...] (4) [...] slayer of the land Al[zu (?) ...] (5) [...] to the full extent of the border(s), king [...] [...] (6) [...] untrodden paths [...] (7) [...] (traces) [...] (Remainder broken)
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
[... mGIŠ.tukul]-⸢ti?⸣-dnin-urta [...] / [...] UN.MEŠ ni-šit ⸢d⸣[...] / [...].⸢MEŠ⸣ MAN.MEŠ ša iš-⸢tu⸣ [...] / [...]-ti né-e-ir KUR.al-[...] / [...] a-di ZAG gim-ri MAN x [...] / [...] ⸢ar⸣-ḫi la pe-tu-⸢te?⸣ [...] / [...] 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 Q005882.
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/Q005882/..
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
An early witness to systematic administrative notation at Kish. Its signs and numerals can be catalogued, but that does not establish a full translation or prove that it is the world's first writing.
An early surviving historical monument that joins named rulers, a territorial dispute and religious oaths. It shows how a city-state turned victory into a lasting public claim, without establishing that this was the first recorded conflict.