Position in chronology
SAA 04 178. Should Prince Assurbanipal Appoint NN to an Office? (PRT 053) [appointment]
Translation · reference
High confidence(1) [Šamaš, great lord, gi]ve m[e a firm positive answer to what I am asking you]! (2) [Should Assurbanipal, son of Esarhaddon], king of Assyria, [appoint the man whose name is written in this papyrus] and [pla]ced [before your great divinity ......]? (Rest destroyed)
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/P237642/
Why it matters
Transliteration
[dUTU EN GAL-ú šá a-šal-lu-ka an-na GI.NA a-pal]-⸢an⸣-ni / [LÚ šá MU-šú i-na ni-ʾa-a-ri an-na-a šaṭ-ru]-ma / [i-na IGI DINGIR-ti-ka GAL-ti GAR]-un / [mdaš-šur—DÙ—DUMU.UŠ DUMU mdaš-šur—ŠEŠ—SUM-na] LUGAL KUR—aš-šur / [x x x x x x x x x x x x]+⸢x⸣-su
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 P237642.
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/P237642/..
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/P237642/.
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