Position in chronology
SAA 04 089. Should Prince Assurbanipal Send a Message to Arwad? (AGS 066) [military and political]
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 4(1) [Ša]maš, great lord, give me a f[irm positive answer] to what I am as[king you]! (2) Should Assurbanipal, son of Esar[haddon, king of Assyria], send Nabû-šarru-uṣur, the rab mūgi, to Ikkalû, who dwells in the city Arwad? (4) If he sends him, will Ikkalû listen to and comply with the message which [Assurbani]pal is sen[ding] to Ikkalû by the hand of Nabû-šarru-uṣur, the rab mūgi? (6) Does your great divinity know it? Is it decreed and confirmed in a favorable case, by the command of your great divinity, Šamaš, great lord? Will he who can see, see it? Will he who can hear, hear it? (8)…
State Archives of Assyria, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
[d]⸢UTU⸣ EN GAL-ú šá a-⸢šal⸣-[lu-ka an-nam GI].⸢NA⸣ a-pal-an-ni / maš-šur—DÙ—DUMU.UŠ DUMU maš-šur—[ŠEŠ—SUM-na LUGAL KUR—aš-šur md]AG—LUGAL—ŠEŠ LÚ.GAL—mu-gi / a-na UGU mik-ka-lu-⸢ú šá⸣ i-na ŠÀ ⸢URU.ar⸣-ú-a-da áš-bu liš!-pur-šú / GIM il-tap-ru-šú mim-ma UMUŠ dib-bi šá [maš-šur—DÙ]—DUMU.UŠ i-na ŠU.2 mdAG—LUGAL—ŠEŠ LÚ.GAL—mu-gi / a-na mik-ka-lu-ú i-šap-[pa-ru] mik-ka-lu-ú i-šá-me-e i-man-gu-ú-ru /…
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 P336061.
Attribution
Image: BM — (British Museum, London, UK) — from Nineveh (mod. Kuyunjik) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P336061). source
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/P336061/.
Related tablets
Related sources
Whatever its purpose, this single tablet shows that Babylonian mathematicians, working in base-60, had an arithmetic understanding of right triangles a millennium before Pythagoras was born.
The single most important literary discovery of the 19th century. It rewired the understanding of the Bible's literary context and proved that the Mesopotamian flood tradition is older. It is the oldest surviving epic poetry in human history.
The literary tradition is no longer anonymous from this point. Authorship — the idea that a specific human voice composes a specific work — enters the historical record with her.