Position in chronology
Ashurnasirpal II 046
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Ashurnasirpal (II), strong king, [..., king of As]syria, chosen of your father — the god Enlil, whose commands [are unalterable — ... He (the king) has trod] difficult paths, mighty mountain chains [...] and he has conquered all those insubmissive to him [...]. (4b - 5) [...] …, the temple of the goddess Ištar, [... its] dilapida[ted section(s) …]
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
maš-šur-PAP-A MAN ⸢dan⸣-[nu ... MAN KUR aš]-šur ni-ši-it a-bi-ki / dBAD šá siq-ri-šú [...] ⸢ar⸣-ḫi pa-áš-qu-te ki-ṣir / ḫur-šá-ni dan-⸢nu⸣-[ti ...]-⸢ma⸣ kúl-lat la ma-gi-ri-šú / ŠU-su ik-[šu-ud ...] x x x ⸢É dINANNA⸣ / an-⸢ḫu⸣-[su ...]
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 Q004500.
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/Q004500/..
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/Q004500/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.