The prisms of Tiglath-pileser I: a royal text from Ashur

The explanations distinguish finds, interpretations and open questions. Sources appear at the end of the page.

What is known about the text

According to the details recorded from the online edition Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online (RIAo), part of the Oracc project, the text belongs to Tiglath-pileser I, whose dates there are about 1114-1076 BCE, and it is known from prisms from the city of Ashur. The edition is published under a CC BY-SA 3.0 licence. The edition page could not be opened in this round, so the details are given narrowly, as recorded. Source 1.

A text and its copies

"Known from prisms", in the plural, means that the same text survives on more than one object. The dates 1114-1076 BCE are the king's dates, not dates established for each prism separately; the recorded details do not say how many prisms there are, where in Ashur they were found, or whether all of them were made in his reign. Dating a particular prism requires its own object record, not only the edition of the text. Source 1.

Between two pages of the timeline

On the Met's timeline page for Mesopotamia, 2000-1000 BCE, the Middle Assyrian period in the north is dated about 1350-1100 BCE, and the "Iron Age" begins about 1200 BCE, with no regional name. The next page, for 1000 BCE-1 CE, opens the Neo-Assyrian empire about 911 BCE. The king's reign therefore begins before the end of the timeline's Middle Assyrian period and continues after it, into years that neither page names for the north. On this site the reign falls entirely within the early Iron Age in Mesopotamia, 1200-911 BCE, and that is where the article is placed. Sources 1, 2, 3.

Ashur in his time

According to UNESCO's World Heritage page for Ashur, the city was the first capital of the Assyrian Empire from the 14th to the 9th centuries BC, and the Met's timeline dates to 879 BCE the move of the capital from Ashur to Nimrud under Ashurnasirpal II. Taken together, the two sources put the reign of Tiglath-pileser I within the time when Ashur was the capital. That is a combination of two sources, not a statement of the edition. The site's article on Ashur explains why the capital phase itself is not placed on this page. Sources 4, 3.

Scope of reading: the Oracc edition page could not be opened on 24 October 2026, because automated access to it was blocked; its details are given as recorded at the research stage that preceded the writing. On the same day the two Met timeline pages for Mesopotamia, 2000-1000 BCE and 1000 BCE-1 CE, and the World Heritage page for Ashur were read. The content of the text itself, its translation and the number of prisms were not checked, so the article does not describe what the king says in it.