Position in chronology
Nimrud NW Palace zzz001 = RIMA 2.0.101.023, ex. add411
About this tablet
A broken piece of a royal inscription of Ashurnasirpal II, the Assyrian king who around 870 BCE moved his capital to Kalhu (modern Nimrud) and built the great Northwest Palace there. This fragment belongs to his so-called Standard Inscription, carved hundreds of times across the palace's stone slabs: it recalls that Kalhu was an old city founded by an earlier king, lists conquered lands such as Zamua, and boasts of the cedar palace and the stone beasts — the famous winged colossi — set up at its gates. The piece, now in Tehran, shows how relentlessly the king broadcast one message throughout his residence.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only scraps of four lines survive, but they come from a text we know well. The king recalls the ancient city of Kalhu, founded long before him, which he rebuilt as his capital; he claims dominion over the land of Zamua in its entirety; he describes the palace of cedar he constructed there; and he mentions the beasts of the mountains and the seas — the great stone creatures he had carved and stationed at the palace gates. The beginnings and ends of every line are lost, but the parallel copies let us restore the sense.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, fragmentary) [...] the anci[ent] city Kalhu [which Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, a prince who preceded me, had built ...] [...] the land Zamua to [its] full ext[ent ...] [...] a palace of cedar [...] [... be]asts of the mountains and of the sea[s (in white limestone and alabaster I fashioned and stationed at its gates) ...]
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
[...] _iri#_ kal#-hu# [maḫ-ra-a ...] [...] _kur#_ za-mu-a ana pat,# [gim-ri-sza2? ...] [...] _e2#-gal# eren-na_ [...] [... u2]-ma#-am _kur-mesz_-e u _a-ab-ba#-[mesz_ ...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Neo-Assyrian (ca. 911-612 BC)) — Nimrud NW Palace zzz001 = RIMA 2.0.101.023, ex. add411. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: NCMI 004 (National Car Museum of Iran, Tehran, Iran) — from Kalhu (mod. Nimrud) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P471655). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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