Position in chronology
Shalmaneser III 052
About this tablet
A badly broken royal building inscription of Shalmaneser III, king of Assyria (858–824 BCE), known only from a fragment. It belongs to a well-attested group of texts commemorating the king's restoration of the temple of the goddess Šarrat-nipḫi at Kalḫu (modern Nimrud), a shrine his ancestor Tukultī-Ninurta I had built centuries earlier. Even in ruins, the fragment preserves the classic rhythm of Assyrian royal piety: the king's lineage, the decayed temple, and its renewal.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only scraps of this text survive, but they follow a familiar script. The opening names the king's ancestor Tukultī-Ninurta, called 'strong king.' Then comes the standard story: 'When the temple of the goddess Šarrat-nipḫi had fallen into disrepair, Shalmaneser...' — and here the text breaks off, though parallel copies tell us he rebuilt it. The last readable line refers again to 'that temple.' In modern terms: a royal press release recording that King Shalmaneser III restored a crumbling temple originally built by his forefather. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(line 1) [...] Tukultī-Ninurta (II), stro[ng] king, [...] (line 2) [... Wh]en the temple of the goddess Šarrat-[nipḫi ...] (line 3) [(...) had become dilapidated, and] Shalmaneser (III) [...] (line 4) [...] ... th[at] temple [...]
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
[...] TUKUL-MAŠ LUGAL ⸢dan⸣-[nu ...] / [... e]-nu-ma É dGAŠAN-[KUR-ḫa ...] / [(...) e-na-aḫ-ma m]⸢d⸣sál-ma-nu-⸢SAG⸣ [...] / [...] x É šu-[a-tu ...]
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 Q004657.
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/Q004657/..
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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