Position in chronology
SAA 13 134. Letter of Complaint about Pulu (ABL 0951)
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 13(Beginning destroyed or not translatable) (4) The matter which [he ...] will not pl[ease] the king. (5) Now Pulu, the lamentation priest, has been acting arbitrarily in the temple of Nabû. Without the permission of the king, he tore out doorposts, fastened others, and cut down the ... in the Akitu house of N[abû] and the Akitu house of Tašmetu. As for the golden table of [Mar]duk, which Sargon had made, he assigned a goldsmith to it. He removed the old work and replaced it with new. (12) Furthermore, the dragons upon which Nabû stands, and the socle between them — he has made a sketch out of…
State Archives of Assyria, volume 13 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
LUGAL [x x x x x x x] pa is [x x x x]-tú? / ina ŠÀ-⸢bi⸣ [x x x x x x] ù [x x x x]-⸢pa⸣-tum / is-si-⸢ḫir⸣ [x x x x x x] ma ad [x x x x x] / a-bu-tu* ša ⸢x x⸣-la?-ni a-na LUGAL la ⸢ṭa*⸣-[ba-at] / ú-ma-a mpu-ú-lu LÚ.UŠ.KU ki-i ra-[me-ni-šu] / ina É—dPA up-pa-áš ina É—a-ki-ti ša ⸢d*⸣[PA] / ù É—a-ki-ti ša dtaš-me-tum ša ⸢la*⸣-a ⸢LUGAL*⸣ / GIŠ.šu-up-šá-a-te it-ta-sa-aḫ ša-ni-a-te iṣ-ṣa-bat /…
Scholarly note
Letter from a temple priest or ritual official to Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal, edited by Steven Cole & Peter Machinist (SAA 13, 1998). ORACC text P334641.
Attribution
Image: Adapted from Steven W Cole, Peter Machinist, Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Priests to Kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal (State Archives of Assyria, 13), 1998. Lemmatised by Mikko Luukko and Silvie Zamazalová, 2011-13, as part of the AHRC-funded research project “Mechanisms of Communication in an Ancient Empire: The Correspondence between the King of Assyria and his Magnates in the 8th Century BC” (AH/F016581/1; University College London) directed by Karen Radner. The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/saao/P334641/..
Translation excerpted from Cole, S.W. & Machinist, P. 1998. Letters from Priests to the Kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal. SAA 13. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa13/P334641/.
Related tablets
Related sources
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.
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.