Sennacherib 038
| Obverse | ||
| 11 | (1) Sennacherib, great king, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, king of the four quarters (of the world), (and) favorite of the great gods: | |
| 22 | ||
| 33 | ||
| 44 | ||
| 55 | (5) The god Aššur and the goddess Ištar granted me a weapon without equal and gave me the strength (lit. “opened my arms”) to destroy those hostile to Assyria. With their great support, (10) I constantly directed my troops in safety from east to west and I made all of the rulers who sit on (royal) daises throughout the four quarters (of the world) bow down at my feet and they (now) pull my yoke. | |
| 66 | ||
| 77 | ||
| 88 | ||
| 99 | ||
| 1010 | ||
| 1111 | ||
| 1212 | ||
| 1313 | (13b) At that time, I enlarged the site of Nineveh, my capital city. I broadened its streets for the course of a royal road and (thus) I made (the city) as bright as day. I had an inner and outer wall skillfully built and I raised (them) as high as mountain(s). I widened its moat 100 large cubits. | |
| 1414 | ||
| 1515 | ||
| 1616 | ||
| 1717 | ||
| 1818 | ||
| 1919 | (19b) So that in the future there would be no diminution of the royal road, I had steles made and they stood on each side, opposite one another. I measured the width of the royal road, as far as the Gate of the Gardens, as fifty-two large cubits. | |
| 2020 | ||
| 2121 | ||
| 2222 | ||
| 2323 | ||
| 2424 | (24) At any time, when (anyone of) the people living in this city tears down his old house and builds a new one — if the foundation of his house encroaches upon the royal road, he will be hung (lit. “they will hang him”) on a stake over his house. | |
| 2525 | ||
| 2626 | ||
| 2727 |
1The list of titles and epithets is identical to that in text no. 37 lines 1–4a; that inscription is dated to the eponymy of Nabû-kēnu-uṣur (690).
2ul-tu ṣi-taš a-di šil-la-an “from east to west”: This expression also occurs in text no. 37 lines 11–12.
3Cf. text no. 18 vii 49´–52´.
4Cf. text no. 17 viii 15.
5Text no. 18 vii 19–20 also records the widening of the moat to a width of 100 large cubits. The moat is clearly visible only on the north and east walls, about 80 m in front of the wall; it is 70 m wide and 10 m deep (after erosion). A relief from the South-West Palace (Layard, Discoveries p. 231) may show the southwestern corner of the wall with the moat. See Reade, RLA 9/5–6 (2000) p. 390 fig. 1 and p. 400 fig. 5.
652 “fifty-two” is clear on all three exemplars; it is not 62 “sixty-two” (so 1 R pl. 7 VIII F and Luckenbill, Senn. p. 153).
7Ex. 1 omits a-di KÁ.GAL GIŠ.KIRI₆.MEŠ “as far as the Gate of the Gardens.” E. Frahm (Sanherib p. 138) suggests that the gate name was not included in this exemplar since the names of some of the gates had changed and the writer of this copy of the text was not certain about the name of the gate to which the royal road ran. The Gate of the Gardens, called “The God Igisigsig Is the One Who Makes Orchards Flourish” (dIGI.SIG₇.SIG₇ mu-šam-me-eḫ ṣip-pa-a-te), was originally the westernmost gate on the north wall, but later that name was given to a gate just south of the citadel, where the Ḫusur River (mod. Khosr) intersected the wall. The gate formerly called the Gate of the Gardens was renamed “The Divine Nannāru Is the One Who Makes Firm My Lordly Crown” (dŠEŠ.KI-ru mu-kin a-ge-e be-lu-ti-ia), the Sîn Gate. The name of the gate in ex. 2, therefore, referred to the original name of the gate, not, if Frahm’s suggested date proves correct, the name of the gate at the time the stele was inscribed (ca. 693–691), which was the Sîn Gate. For further information on the gates, see p. 16. Frahm (Sanherib map after pl. XIII) tentatively proposes that the royal road mentioned in this inscription ran from the Aššur Gate in the south wall, east past the armory and the citadel, to the Sîn Gate (formerly the Gate of the Gardens) at the western end of the north wall. See for example, Frahm, Sanherib pp. 273–275; and Reade, RLA 9/5–6 (2000) pp. 402–403. However, S. Lumsden (ICAANE Proceedings 1 pp. 817–818 and p. 825 fig. 1), based on his work in the lower town in 1989–90 (Lumsden, Mar Šipri 4 [1991] pp. 1–3; and Stronach and Lumsden, BiAr 55 [1992] p. 229), proposes that the royal road ran north to the Nergal Gate, and not northwest to the Sîn Gate. He also proposes that such a road would have entered the city from the east, through the Šamaš Gate, Nineveh’s largest city gate.
8il-la-lu-šú “he will be hung (lit. “they will hang him”)”: Exs. 2–3 have il-la-lu-šu.
Created by A. Kirk Grayson, Jamie Novotny, and the Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) Project, 2012. Lemmatized by Jamie Novotny, 2011. The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/rinap/Q003512/.