Position in chronology
SAA 13 119. Fragmentary Report Concerning Egyptian Horses (ABL 1427)
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 13(1) [To] the king, [my] lo[rd]: your [servant Nabû-šumu-iddina]. The very be[st] of health to [the king, my lord]! May Nabû and Mar[duk] bless the king, my lord! (7) The 5 wounded Egyptian horses from Adad-ereš [abou]t which the king, my lord, wrote to me [...]... Egypt [......] (Rest destroyed)
State Archives of Assyria, volume 13 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
[a-na] LUGAL be-[lí-ia] / [ARAD]-ka md[PA—MU—AŠ] / lu DI-mu a-na [LUGAL be-lí-ia] / a—dan-niš a—dan-[niš] / dPA dAMAR.[UTU] / a-na LUGAL be-lí-ia lik-ru-bu / 05 ANŠE.KUR.RA-MEŠ KUR.mu-ṣur-a.[a] / si-im-ma-ta-nu-te / ša mdIM—APIN-eš [o] / ša LUGAL be-lí [o] / [ina] ⸢UGU*⸣-šú-nu iš-pur-u-ni [o] / [x x x]+⸢x⸣ KUR.mu-ṣur [x x] / [x x x x x x x x]
Scholarly note
Letter from a temple priest or ritual official to Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal, edited by Steven Cole & Peter Machinist (SAA 13, 1998). ORACC text P334900.
Attribution
Image: Adapted from Steven W Cole, Peter Machinist, Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Priests to Kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal (State Archives of Assyria, 13), 1998. Lemmatised by Mikko Luukko and Silvie Zamazalová, 2011-13, as part of the AHRC-funded research project “Mechanisms of Communication in an Ancient Empire: The Correspondence between the King of Assyria and his Magnates in the 8th Century BC” (AH/F016581/1; University College London) directed by Karen Radner. The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/saao/P334900/..
Translation excerpted from Cole, S.W. & Machinist, P. 1998. Letters from Priests to the Kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal. SAA 13. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa13/P334900/.
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.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.
Part of the earliest known body of international diplomatic correspondence. Akkadian, written in cuneiform on clay, was the lingua franca of Late Bronze Age statecraft — used between Egypt, the Hittites, Mitanni, Babylon, Assyria, and the Levantine vassals.