Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 04 149. Should Esarhaddon Appoint Sin-nadin-apli as Crown Prince? (AGS 107) [appointment]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P237797

Translation · reference

High confidence
(1) Šamaš, great lord, give me a firm positive answer to what I am asking you! (2) Should Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, strive and plan? Should he enter his son, Sin-nadin-apli, whose name is written in this papyrus and placed before your great divinity, into the Succession Palace? (4) Is it pleasing to your great divinity? Is it acceptable to your great divinity? Does your great divinity know it? (7) Is the entering of Sin-nadin-apli, son of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, whose name is written in this papyrus, into the Succession Palace, decreed and confirmed in a favorable case, by the command…

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/P237797/

Why it matters

Transliteration

dUTU EN GAL-ú šá a-šal-lu-ka an-nam GI.NA a-pal-an-ni / mAN.ŠÁR—ŠEŠ—SUM-na LUGAL KUR—aš-šur.KI li-iṣ-rim lik-pid-ma md30—SUM-na—DUMU.UŠ DUMU-šú / šá MU-šú i-⸢na⸣ ni-a-ri an-na-a šaṭ-ru-ma i-na IGI DINGIR-ti-ka GAL-ti GAR-un / a-na É—re-du-tu ⸢lu⸣-še-rib UGU DINGIR-ti-ka GAL-ti ŠE.GA-i / pa-an DINGIR-ti-ka GAL-ti ma-ḫi-i-ri / DINGIR-ut-ka GAL-ti <<ti>> ZU-e / TU-bi šá md30—SUM-na—A DUMU-šú šá…

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 P237797.

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/P237797/..
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/P237797/.

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