1400 – 1077 BCE

Middle Assyrian

Aššur's first imperial expansion.

Featured tablet

Adad-narari I 01

Assyria comes into its own as a regional power. Tukulti-Ninurta I sacks Babylon and brings its gods and tablets back to Aššur. Tiglath-pileser I leads campaigns west to the Mediterranean and north into the mountains. The Middle Assyrian Laws (MAL), copied at Aššur, are the most extensive legal corpus before the Neo-Babylonian period.

Primary sources

Tablets from this period

1737 tablets dated to Middle Assyrian — showing 24 below; browse all 1737.

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianOur engine

Adad-narari I 01

Lists the cities and peoples — Kassites, Gutians, Lullumê, Šubareans — subjugated by Adad-nārārī I, documenting Assyria's territorial expansion toward the Euphrates and into Mitanni's former heartland around 1300 BCE.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianRIAo

Adad-narari I 06

A building inscription of Adad-nārārī I dedicating a standard to Ištar and invoking Aššur's favour for any future ruler who restores the monument — an early attestation of the Assyrian royal restoration formula that would persist for centuries.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianRIAo

Adad-narari I 1001

Attests Adad-nārārī I's campaign into the Lullumê highlands, placing Assyrian military reach into the Zagros within the generation that transformed Assyria from a vassal into an imperial power.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianRIAo

Adad-narari I 25

Labels booty taken from Naḫur, placing the city within Adad-nārārī I's documented conquests and anchoring his western campaigns in the archaeological record of early Middle Assyrian expansion.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianRIAo

Adad-narari I 31

Stamps Adad-nārārī I's ownership of a labūnu-house forecourt: one of the earliest Assyrian royal building inscriptions asserting the "king of the world" titulary that would define imperial rhetoric for centuries.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianRIAo

Adad-narari I 35

Records Adad-nārārī I's renovation of the processional avenue at Aššur's temple, anchoring the physical expansion of Assyrian royal piety to a specific monarch at the dawn of the Middle Assyrian kingdom.

Religion & MythWriting & Literature

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianRIAo

Adad-narari I 39

Marks Adad-nārārī I's construction of a quay wall at the palace canal: physical evidence of royal infrastructure investment at Aššur in the early Middle Assyrian period.

Writing & Literature

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianRIAo

Adad-narari I 40

Marks Adad-nārārī I as builder of Aššur's Tigris quay wall, anchoring his public-works program in the archaeological and epigraphic record of early Middle Assyrian urban infrastructure.

Writing & Literature

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianRIAo

Adad-narari I 44

A palace inscription of Adad-nārārī I asserting the title 'king of the world' — early epigraphic evidence of Assyrian kings adopting the universal-sovereignty rhetoric previously claimed by Babylonian and Akkadian rulers.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianOur engine

Aššur-bel-kala 01

Attests Aššur-bel-kala's campaign against the land Ḫimme, preserving early Assyrian royal rhetoric of total destruction — flaying, mass deportation, corpse-mounds — that would define the empire's self-presentation for centuries.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianOur engine

Aššur-bel-kala 08

Attests Aššur-bēl-kala's titulature and genealogy — anchoring his reign within the Tiglath-pileser I dynasty — though heavy damage leaves his specific deeds and the presiding eponym unrecoverable.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianOur engine

Aššur-bel-kala 09

Records Aššur-bel-kala crossing the Euphrates twice in one year on goatskin rafts to pursue Aramean and Sutean groups near Mount Lebanon — early evidence of Assyrian military pressure on these semi-nomadic peoples.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianOur engine

Aššur-reša-iši I 02

Records Aššur-rēša-iši I's construction at the Ištar temple in Nineveh, situating this reign within the architectural patronage that defined Middle Assyrian kingship's claim to divine favour from Anu, Enlil, and Ea.

Religion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianOur engine

Eriba-Adad II 1

Preserves the titulary of Erība-Adad II, attesting the full fourfold royal ideology — king of the world, Assyria, and the four quarters — at the dawn of the Middle Assyrian imperial self-conception.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianOur engine

Shalmaneser I 09

Records Shalmaneser I's restoration of the Libūr-šalḫī Gate at Aššur, fixing the king's piety and building programme in the mid-13th century BCE, before Assyria's rise to full imperial power.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianOur engine

Shalmaneser I 17

Credits Ištar of Nineveh — not Aššur alone — as the divine force behind Shalmaneser I's campaigns against Šubarû, Lullumê, and Qutû, documenting the goddess's role in mid-13th-century Assyrian royal ideology.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianOur engine

Shalmaneser I 18

Shalmaneser I's titulary here fuses Enlil-derived legitimacy with military conquest across Qutû, Lullumê, and Šubarû, documenting the mid-13th-century BCE consolidation of Assyrian royal ideology in its earliest monumental form.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianOur engine

Tiglath-pileser I 01

Opens with the fullest early pantheon invocation in Tiglath-pileser I's royal corpus, mapping the precise hierarchy — Aššur, Enlil, Sîn, Šamaš, Adad, Ninurta — that legitimised Middle Assyrian imperial kingship.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianOur engine

Tiglath-pileser I 02

Preserves the divine invocation formula of Tiglath-pileser I, naming Aššur, Enlil, Sîn, Šamaš, and Adad as guarantors of Assyrian royal authority — a theological blueprint for Middle Assyrian kingship ideology.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianOur engine

Tiglath-pileser I 10

Attests Tiglath-pileser I's claim to rule 'from Babylon to the Upper Sea of Amurru' — pinning the rhetorical geography of Middle Assyrian imperial ideology to a specific, verifiable territorial horizon.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianOur engine

Tiglath-pileser I 12

Lists fourteen conquered cities in the lands of Qumanî and Ḫabḫu — territories whose rulers had withheld tribute from Aššur — supplying rare toponymic evidence for Assyrian expansion into the northern periphery under Tiglath-pileser I.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianRIAo

Aššur-dan I 1001

One of the surviving royal inscriptions of Aššur-dān I, attesting the titulary and self-presentation of a Middle Assyrian king at the threshold of Assyria's rise to imperial power.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianRIAo

Aššur-dan I 1002

One of the surviving royal inscriptions of Aššur-dān I, attesting Assyrian kingship ideology at a period when Middle Assyrian power was consolidating along the middle Tigris.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

~1300 BCE·Middle AssyrianRIAo

Aššur-nadin-ahhe II 1

Attests the title 'vice-regent of the god Aššur' under a mid-14th-century king, anchoring the ideological formula of divine stewardship that would define Assyrian royal self-presentation for centuries.

Writing & LiteratureReligion & Myth

See all 1737 tablets in Middle Assyrian