Position in chronology
Ashurbanipal 049
Written in modern English
Ummanaldaš — Ḫumban-ḫaltaš III, king of Elam — had already witnessed the fury of the god Aššur's weapons and fled into the mountains to hide. Then the city ruler of Murubissi reconsidered the power of Aššur, and something — the surface is damaged here — moved him to act: he seized Ummanaldaš and brought him before Ashurbanipal. A name and several details earlier in the passage are too broken to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — scholar edition
RINAP 5(1) [Ummanaldaš (Ḫumban-ḫaltaš III), (the king of the land Elam) who had seen the rage of] the weapon of (the god) Aššur, my lord, [(...) and had returned] from the mountain(s), his place of refuge. [PN, the city rul]er of the city Murubissi (Marubišti), [thought about ... the migh]t of (the god) Aššur, my lord, [and ...]. He seized Ummanaldaš, and [...] brought him before me.
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
[mum-man-al-daš? (MAN? KUR.ELAM.MA.KI?) ša? šu-uš-mur?] GIŠ.TUKUL AN.ŠÁR EN-ia1 / [(...) e-mu-ru-ma? i-tu-ru?] ul-tú KUR-e a-šar mar-qí-ti-šú / [... LÚ.EN].⸢URU?⸣ ša URU.mu-ru-ú-bi-si / [... da-na]-⸢an?⸣ AN.ŠÁR EN-ia / [iḫ-su-us-ma ... m]um-man-al-daš iṣ-bat-ma / [...] il-qa-áš-šú a-di maḫ-ri-ia
Scholarly note
Royal inscription of Ashurbanipal or a late Sargonid successor, edited by Jamie Novotny & Joshua Jeffers (RINAP 5, 2018–). ORACC text Q003748.
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/Q003748/..
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/Q003748/.
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.