Position in chronology
Ashurnasirpal II 043
About this tablet
A badly broken fragment of a royal inscription of Ashurnasirpal II, king of Assyria in the ninth century BCE. What survives is part of his standard titulary — the string of grandiose epithets that opened nearly every Assyrian royal text: sun-god of the people, vice-regent of the god Aššur, conqueror of mountain passes, avenger of Assyria. Such inscriptions were carved on palace walls and stone slabs at his capital Kalḫu (Nimrud) to broadcast his divinely sanctioned power. The final surviving words hint that the narrative was about to invoke the god Anu.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only scattered phrases survive, but they belong to the king's opening self-presentation: he is the sun of all the peoples, the ruler who serves as the god Aššur's earthly deputy, a man who marches constantly on campaign, subdues his opponents, and pushes through mountain passes and difficult roads into the lands of his foes, striking down his enemies. He calls himself shepherd of the four quarters of the world and the avenger of Assyria. The text then begins a new section — 'When the god Anu...' — but everything after that is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(lines fragmentary throughout) [... sun(god) of al]l of the people, ruler, vice-regent of (the god) Aššur [...] [... who] constantly marches about and [...] [...] ... [...] (line too broken to read) [...] subduer of [...] [... who] travels through the mountain passes [...] [...] difficult routes [...] [...] the land of his foes [...] [...] his enemies he struck down [...] [...] ... distant [...] [... shepherd of the] four quarters (of the world), who ... the entirety of [...] [... avenger (lit. the one who returns] the favor) of [the land of] Assyria [...] [... When the god] Anu ...
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
[... dšam-šu kiš]-⸢šat⸣ UN.MEŠ NUN-ú ŠID aš-šur [...] / [...] DU.DU-ku-ma [...] / [...] x de e nu [...] / [...] ⸢mu⸣-šék-niš [...] / [... mu-tal]-lik sa-an-ga-ni [...] / [...] ar-ḫi pa-áš-qu-te [...] / [...] KUR za-i-ri-šú [...] / [...] ge-ri-šú id-du-[...] / [...]-tu ṣa-tum [...] / [... SIPA kib]-rat LÍMMU-ta šá nap-ḫar [...] / [... mu-ter] gi-mil-⸢li?⸣ [KUR] aš-šur [...] / [... e-nu-ma] da-num…
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 Q004497.
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/Q004497/..
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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.