Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 10 023. Refuting a Sighting of Mercury (ABL 0037) [from astrologers]

~670 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P333989

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 10
High confidence
(1) To the king, my lord: your servant Issar-šumu-ereš. Good health to the king, my lord! May Nabû and Marduk bless the king, my lord! (6) As to what the king, my lord, wrote to me: "One of your colleagues wrote to me: the planet Mercury will be visible in the month Nisan (I). What do you take the present month to be?" — we take the present month to be Adar (XII) and we take this day to be the 25th. (13) [...]... (14) [The person who] wrote this [... to the king, my lord, ...] (Break) (r 3) "An incompetent one can frustrate [a j]udge, an uneducated one can make the mighty worry" — this is…

State Archives of Assyria, volume 10 — scholar edition (ORACC).

Transliteration

a-na LUGAL EN-[ia] / ARAD-ka m15—MU—KAM-eš / lu DI-mu a-na LUGAL EN-⸢ia⸣ / dPA u dAMAR.UTU / a-na LUGAL EN-ía lik-ru-bu / ša LUGAL be-li iš-pur-an-ni / ma-a 01-en ina LÚ.ki-na-ta-ti-ku-nu / is-sap-ra ma-a dUDU.IDIM / ina ITI.BARAG IGI.LAL / ma-a ITI an-ni-u mì-i-nu tu-kal-la / ITI an-ni-u ITI.ŠE nu-ka-la / UD-mu an-ni-u UD 25-KÁM nu-ka-la / [x x x x x x]+⸢x⸣-ra-ni ka ⸢x⸣ ḫu / [x x x x x x]…

Scholarly note

Letter from a scholar (astrologer, exorcist, physician, lamentation-priest) to Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal, edited by Simo Parpola (SAA 10, 1993). ORACC text P333989.

Attribution

Image: Adapted from Simo Parpola, Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars (State Archives of Assyria, 10), 1993. Lemmatised by Mikko Luukko, 2016, 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/P333989/..
Translation excerpted from Parpola, S. 1993. Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars. SAA 10. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa10/P333989/.

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