Position in chronology
SAA 08 282. Venus Near Pleiades (RMA 243B) [planetary]
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 8(1) If in month M[archesvan (VIII) ......] people [......]. (3) If a cl[oud] confronts the sun at its rising: plenty (for) all lands. (r 1) If at the beginning of the year the Pleiades stand on the left of Venus: the enemy, variant: a flood will disrupt the harvest. (r 4) From Nergal-eṭir.
State Archives of Assyria, volume 8 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
1 ina ITI.⸢APIN?⸣ [x x x x] / UN-MEŠ gam [x x x x x] / 1 20 ina KUR-šú IM.[DIRI] ⸢im-ḫur⸣-šú / nu-ḫuš KUR.KUR [o] / 1 ina SAG MU MUL.MUL / ina KAB? MUL.dil-bat GUB / LÚ.KÚR : A.KAL BURU₁₄ ú-tál-lal / šá mdU.GUR—KAR-ir
Scholarly note
Astrological report from a court scholar to an Assyrian king, edited by Hermann Hunger (SAA 8, 1992). Celestial and meteorological observation correlated with omens. ORACC text P237285.
Attribution
Image: Adapted from Hermann Hunger, Astrological Reports to Assyrian Kings (State Archives of Assyria, 8), 1992. Lemmatised by Mikko Luukko, 2016-17, 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/P237285/..
Translation excerpted from Hunger, H. 1992. Astrological Reports to Assyrian Kings. SAA 8. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa08/P237285/.
Related tablets
Related sources
Whatever its purpose, this single tablet shows that Babylonian mathematicians, working in base-60, had an arithmetic understanding of right triangles a millennium before Pythagoras was born.
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.