Position in chronology
Ashurnasirpal II 053
Translation — scholar edition
RIAo(1) Palace of Ashurnasirpal (II), great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, son of Tukultī-Ninurta (II), king of the world, king of Assyria, son of Adad-nārārī (II), (who was) also king of the world (and) king of Assyria; conqueror of the Naʾiri lands, to their (text: its) full extent, from the passes of the land Ḫabruri to the land Gilzānu; he conquered from the source of the Subnat River to the land Šubria; I brought within the boundaries of my land (the territory stretching) from the opposite bank of the Tigris River to the land Ḫatti, the land Lāqê, in its entirety,…
Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online — scholar edition (ORACC / MOCCI).
Transliteration
É.GAL maš-šur-PAP-A MAN GAL MAN dan-nu MAN KIŠ MAN KUR aš-šur A GIŠ.tukul-ti-dMAŠ MAN KIŠ MAN KUR aš-šur A dIŠKUR-ERIM.TÁḪ MAN KIŠ MAN KUR AŠ-ma ka-ši-id KUR.KUR na-i-ri / ana paṭaṭ gim-ri-šá iš-tu né-re-bi šá KUR.ḫab-ru-ri a-di KUR.gíl-za-a-ni TA SAG e-ni ÍD.su-ub-na-at a-di KUR.šub-re-e / qa-a-ti ik-šud TA e-ber-ta-an ÍD.IDIGNA a-di KUR.ḫa-at-ti KUR.la-qe-e a-na si-ḫír-ti-šá KUR.su-ḫu a-di…
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 Q004507.
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/Q004507/..
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/Q004507/.
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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.