Position in chronology
SAA 04 078. Will Chief Eunuch Ša-Nabu-šu Break the Siege of Ṣiṣṣirtu? [military and political]
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 4(Beginning destroyed) (r 1) [Disregard that the oracle] query has become ju[mbled in the mouth of the haruspex, your servant].[Let them be taken out and put aside]! (r 2) [I ask you, Š]amaš, gre[at] lord, [whether Esarhaddon, king of As]syria, should send Ša-[Nabû-š]û, the chief eunuch, with an a[rmy, (as great) as he wishes, aga]inst the enemy [tro]ops which have now set up camp against the city Ṣiṣṣir[tu, a fortress of] Harhar, (r 6) [(and whether) these will, be it by ..., or in] their fear, or by their own deliberations, abandon [that city Ṣiṣṣi]rtu [...] and go elsewhere. (r 9) Be…
State Archives of Assyria, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
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Transliteration
[e-zib šá i-na KA DUMU—LÚ.ḪAL ARAD-ka ta]-⸢mit⸣ up-[tar-ri-du] / [lu-ú ZI-MEŠ lu-ú BAR-MEŠ a-šal-ka d]⸢UTU⸣ EN ⸢GAL⸣-[ú ki-i] / [mdaš-šur—ŠEŠ—SUM-na LUGAL KUR—aš]-šur.KI mšá—[dAG]—⸢šú⸣-ú LÚ.GAL—SAG a-di e-[mu-qi] / [mál ŠÀ-ba-šú ub-lu a-na] ⸢UGU ERIM⸣-MEŠ KÚR šá i-[na]-an-na i-na UGU URU.ṣi-ṣi-ir-[ti] / [URU.bir-ti šá] ⸢URU⸣.ḫar-ḫar ma-dak-ta GAR-an i-šap-pa-ru-ma / [x x x x lu-ú i-na]…
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 P237538.
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/P237538/..
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/P237538/.
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