Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 04 058. Should Esarhaddon Send an Aramean Scribe to NN? (PRT 025) [military and political]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P336337

Translation · reference

High confidence
(Beginning destroyed) (1) [......] their [......] (2) [......] that [......] (3) [......] Mutu [......] (4) [......] the Sap[ardean ......] (5) [......] city or [......] (6) [......] will plunder ...[......]. (r 1) [Disregard the (formulation) of] today's case, b[e it good, be it faulty]. (r 2) [Disregard that a clean or an u]nclean person has to[uched] the sacrificial sheep, [or blocked the way of the sacrificial sheep]. (r 3) [Disregard that an uncl]ean man or woman [has come near] the pl[ace of the extispicy and made it unclean]. (r 4) [Disregard that the r]am (offered) to your divinity…

Source: Starr, I. 1990. Queries to the Sungod: Divination and Politics in Sargonid Assyria. SAA 4. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa04/P336337/

Why it matters

Transliteration

[x x x x x x x]-ši-⸢na?⸣ [x x x x x x x x] / [x x x x x x] ⸢UR₅⸣-tú lu [x x x x x x x x x] / [x x x x x x] mmu-tú [x x x x x x x x x] / [x x x x x x]-ru LÚ.sa-⸢bar⸣-[da-a.a x x x x] / [x x x x x x] URU lu-⸢ú⸣ [x x x x x x x x] / [x x x x x]-⸢ku⸣-ú-te i-ḫab-⸢ba⸣-[tu x x x x x x x] / [e-zib šá di]-⸢in⸣ UD-mu NE-i ⸢GIM⸣ [DÙG.GA GIM ḫa-ṭu-ú] / [e-zib šá KUG] ⸢lu⸣-ʾu-ú UDU SISKUR.SISKUR ⸢TAG⸣-[MEŠ…

Scholarly note

Extispicy query addressed to Šamaš, the sungod and patron of divination, edited by Ivan Starr (SAA 4, 1990). The king asks the deity to render a yes/no verdict on a political or military question. ORACC text P336337.

Attribution

Image: Adapted from Ivan Starr, Queries to the Sungod: Divination and Politics in Sargonid Assyria (State Archives of Assyria, 4), 1990. Lemmatised by Mikko Luukko, 2018, as part of the research programme of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair in the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East at LMU Munich (Karen Radner, Humboldt Professorship 2015). The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/saao/P336337/..
Translation excerpted from Starr, I. 1990. Queries to the Sungod: Divination and Politics in Sargonid Assyria. SAA 4. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa04/P336337/.

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