Position in chronology
Shalmaneser II 1
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Monument of Shalmaneser (II), great king, king of the world, king of Assyria, son of Ashurnasirpal (I), king of Assyria, son of Šamšī-Adad (IV), (who was) also king of Assyria.
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
ṣa-lam / mdsál-ma-nu-MAŠ / MAN GAL MAN KIŠ MAN KUR aš-šur / A aš-šur-PAP-A MAN KUR aš-šur / A šam-ši-10 MAN KUR aš-šur-ma
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 Q006008.
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/Q006008/..
Translation excerpted from Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online (RIAo), Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative (MOCCI), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; in association with the RINAP Project, University of Pennsylvania. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/riao/Q006008/.
Related tablets
Related sources
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.
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.