Position in chronology
Ashurbanipal 028
Written in modern English
Urtaku, a relative of Teumman by marriage, had been hit by an arrow but was not yet dead. He called out to a nearby Assyrian soldier and told him to cut off his head — to take it to the king and win glory for himself by doing so.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 5(1) Ur[t]aku, an in-law of Teumman who had been struck by an a[rro]w (but) had not (yet) died, called out to an Assyrian to c[ut of]f his (Urtaku’s) own head, saying “Come here (and) cut off (my) head. Carry (it) before the king, your lord, and obtain fame.”
Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period, volume 5 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
mur-⸢ta⸣-ku ḫa-ta-nu mte-um-man / šá ina ⸢uṣ-ṣi⸣ muḫ-ḫu-ṣu la iq-tú-u ZI.MEŠ / a-na ⸢na-kas⸣ SAG.DU ra-ma-ni-šú DUMU KUR aš-šur / i-šá-si-⸢ma⸣ um-ma al-ka SAG.DU KUD-is / IGI LUGAL EN-ka i-ši-⸢ma le⸣-e-qí MU SIG₅-tim
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Ashurbanipal or a late Sargonid successor, edited by Jamie Novotny & Joshua Jeffers (RINAP 5, 2018–). ORACC text Q003727.
Attribution
Image: Created by Jamie Novotny and Joshua Jeffers, 2015-18. Lemmatized by Jamie Novotny, 2015–16, 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/rinap/Q003727/..
Translation excerpted from Novotny, J. & Jeffers, J. 2018–. The Royal Inscriptions of Ashurbanipal (668–631 BC), Aššur-etel-ilāni (630–627 BC) and Sîn-šarra-iškun (626–612 BC), Kings of Assyria. RINAP 5. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/rinap/rinap5/Q003727/.
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.