Position in chronology
Ashurnasirpal II 111
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Ashurnasirpal (II), appointee of the god Enlil, vice-regent of (the god) Aššur, great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, son of Tukultī-Ninurta (II), great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, son of Adad-nārārī (II), (who was) also great king, strong king, king of the world and king of Assyria: (I am the one) who built and constructed the temple of the goddess Ištar of Nineveh, my lady.
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Why it matters
Attests Ashurnasirpal II's construction of Ištar's Nineveh temple, anchoring his reign within a three-generation dynastic lineage while documenting royal patronage of the city's chief cult.
Transliteration
maš-šur-PAP-A GAR dBAD ŠID aš-šur MAN GAL MAN dan-nu MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR aš-šur / A TUKUL-MAŠ MAN GAL MAN dan-nu MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR aš-šur / A 10-ERIM.TÁḪ MAN GAL MAN dan-nu MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR aš-šur-ma / šá É dINANNA šá URU.ni-nu-a GAŠAN-ia DÙ-ma ar-ṣip
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 Q004565.
Attribution
Image: BM 122662 + BM 128356 (British Museum, London, UK) — from Nineveh (mod. Kuyunjik) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts, P422435). source
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/Q004565/.
Related tablets
Related sources
One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.