Position in chronology
SAA 10 009. A Royal Funeral (ABL 0670) [from astrologers]
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 10(1) To the king, my lord: your servant Issar-šumu-ereš. Good health to the king, my lord! May Nabû and Marduk bless the king, my lord! (6) As to what the king, my lord, wrote to me: "Ask Bel-naṣir, Bel-ipuš and (other) Babylonians whom you know" — I asked them, and they said to me as follows: "An hour after sunrise, the display takes place; an hour and a half after sunrise, [the disp]lay takes place again. [Thereafter] your [bu]rnt-offering [is made]; the display [...] (Break) (r 1) Bel-i[puš] said [as fol]lows: "When the display has been finished, two torches should be moved past the place…
State Archives of Assyria, volume 10 — 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 m15—MU—APIN-eš / lu šul-mu a-na LUGAL EN-ía / dAG u dAMAR.UTU / a-na LUGAL EN-ia lik-ru-bu / ša LUGAL be-li iš-pur-an-ni / ma-a a-na mEN—PAB-ir / a-na mEN—DÙ-uš / ù a-na DUMU-MEŠ KÁ.DINGIR.RA.KI / ša ú-da-kan-ni šá-ʾa-al / as-sa-ʾa-al ki-i an-ni-e / ⸢iq⸣-ṭi-bu-u-ni ma-a ina 1/2* KASKAL.GÍD UD-mu / [i]-⸢šaq⸣-qu-a tak-lim-tu / [ú]-kal-lu-mu / [ma-a] 2/3* KASKAL.GÍD…
Scholarly note
Letter from a scholar (astrologer, exorcist, physician, lamentation-priest) to Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal, edited by Simo Parpola (SAA 10, 1993). ORACC text P334468.
Attribution
Image: BM — (British Museum, London, UK) — from Nineveh (mod. Kuyunjik) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P334468). source
Translation excerpted from Parpola, S. 1993. Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars. SAA 10. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa10/P334468/.
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.