Position in chronology
Ashurnasirpal II 019
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) The deities Aššur, Adad, Sîn and Šamaš, (and) Ištar, the great gods who go at the head of my troops. (5) Ashurnasirpal (II), great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria; (the one who) acts with the support of the gods Aššur (and) Šamaš, the great gods, my lords, and has no rival among the rulers of the (10) four quarters (of the world); attentive ruler, subduer of all of the rulers, fearless in battle, ferocious dragon, the one who breaks up the forces of the rebellious, strong gišginû, who treads upon the necks of the rulers who are insubmissive to him, mighty flood-tide…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
aš-šur dIŠKUR d30 / u dšá-maš dINANNA / DINGIR.MEŠ GAL.MEŠ / a-li-ku-ut IGI ERIM.ḪI.A.MEŠ-a / maš-šur-PAP-A MAN GAL <<MEŠ>> / MAN dan-nu MAN ŠÚ MAN KUR aš-šur / <ša> ina GIŠ.tukul-ti aš-šur dšá-maš / DINGIR.MEŠ GAL.MEŠ EN.MEŠ-a / DU.DU-ku-ma ina mal-ki šá kib-rat / LÍMMU-ta šá-nin-šu la i-šú-ú NUN-ú / na-ʾa-du qa-di-id DÙ mal-ki la a-di-rù / GIŠ.LAL ú-šúm-gal-lu ek-du ⸢mu⸣-pár-ri*-⸢ir ki⸣-- / ṣir…
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 Q004473.
Attribution
Image: Based on A. Kirk Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC I (1114-859 BC) (RIMA 2), Toronto, 1991. Adapted by Jamie Novotny (2015-16) and lemmatized and updated by Nathan Morello (2016-17) for the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation-funded OIMEA Project 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/Q004473/..
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/Q004473/.
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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.