Position in chronology
Ashurnasirpal II 058
About this tablet
A fragment of a royal building inscription of Ashurnasirpal II, king of Assyria in the ninth century BCE. Only scraps survive, but the formulas are unmistakable: the king boasts of his reach 'as far as the sea', records that he rebuilt a temple (here called E-natḫi) originally founded by an earlier prince, deposited his own inscribed monument in its foundations, and closes by asking that any future ruler who finds the stone put it back in its place. Such texts were buried in temple walls precisely so that later kings — and, as it turns out, modern archaeologists — would read them.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives reads like this: the king's power extended all the way to the sea. He turned his attention to the temple E-natḫi, a sanctuary of his lady (a goddess, probably Ištar) that an earlier ruler had built long before. He surveyed its site, dug down to its original foundations, and rebuilt the temple completely, making it beautiful and splendid. Inside it he deposited his own inscribed monument. The text ends with the standard plea to whoever finds this stone in the future: put it back where it belongs. Only traces remain of the final lines.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[... a]s far as the Sea [...] [...] the temple E-natḫi ... [...] [... Ištar(?), m]y [lady], which Aššur-rabi(?), a prince [who preceded me, had built ...] [... I] delineated [its site], [I reached] its foundation pit [...] [... I com]pleted (it), I made it fitting, I made (it) [splendid ...] [... my monumental inscription] I placed within it [...] [... may (a future ruler) return the ins]cribed monument to [its] pla[ce ...] (traces — the remainder is lost)
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
[... a]-⸢di⸣ A.⸢AB⸣.[BA ...] / [...] ⸢É⸣-na-at-ḫi x [...] / [... NIN]-⸢ia⸣ šá maš-šur-GAL ⸢NUN⸣ [...] / [... a-šar-šu] ⸢ú⸣-me-si dan-na-⸢su⸣ [ak-šud ...] / [... ú-šék]-⸢lil⸣ ú-si-im ⸢ú⸣-[šar-riḫ ...] / [... NA₄.NA.RÚ.A-ia] ina qer-bi-šu aš-⸢kun⸣ [...] / [... NA₄.NA].RÚ.A a-na aš-[ri-šú lu-ter ...] / (traces)
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 Q004512.
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/Q004512/..
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.