Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 04 126. Fragment of a Military(?) Query [military and political]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P237550

Translation · reference

High confidence
(Beginning destroyed) (1) [... 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]? (3) [Will he who can se]e, see it? [Will he who can hear, hear it]? (4) Disregard [that ......]. (5) Disregard that an angry, fu[rious man spoke angrily the words of his report]. (6) Disregard that the en[emy will ...] the land [...]. (7) [Disreg]ard the (formulation) of the pray[er for today's case, be it good, be it faulty]. (8) [Disreg]ard that a clean [or an unclean person has touched the sacrificial sheep, or…

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/P237550/

Why it matters

Transliteration

[x x]+⸢x⸣ [x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x] / [i-na KA] DINGIR-[ti-ka GAL-ti dUTU EN GAL-ú qa-bi-i ku-un-i] / [IGI]-ru IGI-[ra ŠE.GA-ú ŠE.GA-e] / e-zib [šá x x x x x x x x x x x x] / e-zib šá šab-su ⸢ra⸣-[aʾ-bu a-mat ṭè-mi-šú ir-ʾu-bu] / e-zib šá LÚ.⸢KÚR?⸣ KUR [x x x x x x x x] / [e]-⸢zib⸣ šá ik-⸢rib⸣ [di-nim UD NE-i GIM DÙG.GA GIM ḫa-ṭu-ú] / [e]-⸢zib⸣ šá KUG [lu-ʾu-ú UDU.NÍTA SISKUR.SISKUR…

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 P237550.

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/P237550/..
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/P237550/.

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