Position in chronology
Adad-nerari III 2011
Written in modern English
In a battle on or near a great river, Šamšī-ilu — described as a man without fear in combat — drove his horses against the enemy. Argišti was defeated in the thick of the fighting: he abandoned his camp and fled on a single horse. What followed involved the army of the land of Amurru and the people of Nir-something — several names and details are lost where the surface is damaged — but the picture is of spreading revolt and carnage, the blood of Argišti's warriors staining the ground red. Several lines in between are too broken to read continuously.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1') [...] troops [...] the river [...] wagon, might of the fearful flood, [...] strife. Šamšī-ilu, a man (who is) fearless [in battle, ...] ... upon his steeds, the extensive river [... (5´) ...] to him and Argišti, in the midst of battle, the bow [... he (Argišti) abandoned] his camp (and) with a single horse he [disappeared]. (6-b) [...] him and the army of the land Amurru, the people of Nir... [...] evil approaching (and) rebellion becoming rife (lit. “strong”) [...] his/its meadow like a ..., like a ... [... (10´) ...] ... the blood of his warriors being shed, with redness [it dyed ...]…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
[...] x um-ma-⸢na-a-te?⸣ [x x x (x)] ⸢ÍD⸣.x [...] / [...]-at GIŠ.ma-gar-ru ⸢gi-piš?⸣ a-ge-e pal-ḫu-[ti? ...] / [...] ⸢ta⸣-ḫa-zi mdUTU-DINGIR eṭ-lu la a-⸢di⸣-[ru ...] / [...] x-li-ta UGU mu-ur-ni-is-qí-šú DAGAL-tú ÍD x [...] / [...]-⸢su⸣-um-ma mar-giš-tu ina qe-reb MÈ GIŠ.PAN x [...] / [... e-zib] ⸢ka⸣-ra-šu-uš ina e-din-né-e si*-si-i e-[li? ...]1 / [...]-su-ma um-ma-na a-mur-ru-ú LÚ.nir-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 Q004791.
Attribution
Image: Based on A. Kirk Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC II (858-745 BC) (RIMA 3), Toronto, 1996. Adapted by Jamie Novotny (2016) 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/Q004791/..
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/Q004791/.
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.