Position in chronology
SAA 15 149. The King of Elam Gets(?) Silver and Gold from(?) Zer-Babili (CT 53 507)
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 15(Beginning destroyed) (r 1) "the king of Ela[m ...] (r 2) [...] Zer-Babi[li ...] (r 3) [...] sen[t ...] (r 4) [...] my father's house [...] (r 5) [...] at his disposal [...] (r 6) [...] silver and gol[d ...] (r 7) [Kalb]i-Ukû [...] (Rest destroyed)
State Archives of Assyria, volume 15 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
[x] ⸢x⸣ [x] ⸢ni⸣ [x x x x x] / [ma]-a LUGAL KUR.NIM.[MA.KI x x x] / [x x]+⸢x⸣ mNUMUN—KÁ.DINGIR.[RA.KI x x] / [x x x]+⸢x⸣ bar i-sap-⸢ra⸣ [x x x] / [x x]-bu-lu É—AD-⸢ia⸣ [x x x] / [x x]-me ina pa-ni-šu ⸢x⸣+[x x x] / [x x]+⸢x⸣-a KUG.UD-MEŠ KUG.⸢GI⸣-[MEŠ x] / [mkal]-⸢bi⸣—ú-ku-ú a-[x x x] / [x x x x x x] ⸢x⸣+[x x x]
Scholarly note
Royal correspondence from Babylonia and the eastern provinces under Sargon II, edited by Andreas Fuchs & Simo Parpola (SAA 15, 2001). ORACC text P313920.
Attribution
Image: BM — (British Museum, London, UK) — from Nineveh (mod. Kuyunjik) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P313920). source
Translation excerpted from Fuchs, A. & Parpola, S. 2001. The Correspondence of Sargon II, Part III: Letters from Babylonia and the Eastern Provinces. SAA 15. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa15/P313920/.
Related tablets
Related sources
One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.
Part of the earliest known body of international diplomatic correspondence. Akkadian, written in cuneiform on clay, was the lingua franca of Late Bronze Age statecraft — used between Egypt, the Hittites, Mitanni, Babylon, Assyria, and the Levantine vassals.