Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 10 033. A Mongoose Under the King’s Chariot (ABL 0385) [from astrologers]

~670 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P334261

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: "Does (the omen) '(If something) passes between the legs of a man' apply to something that came out from underneath a chariot?" — it does apply. (11) The king, my lord, say[s]: "'The legs of a m[an]' (means) 'legs' (only) when (something literally) emerges between a man's (legs); that [mongoose passed] between [...]" — perhaps [...] (Break) (r 1) We still take it as a portent. The [mongoose] pa[ssed] from the left…

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-ia lik-ru-bu / ša LUGAL be-li iš-pur-an-ni / ma-a ú-la? ina bi-rit pu-ri-di / a-me-li e-ti-iq / ina UGU ša šap-la GIŠ.GIGIR-e / tu-ṣu-u-ni ina UGU-ḫi šu-⸢u*⸣ / LUGAL be-li i-qab-[bi] / ma-a pu-ri-di ⸢a⸣-[me-li] / pu-ri-di ki-ma ⸢bi*-rit*⸣ [pu-ri-di] / ša LÚ ú-⸢ṣa⸣ [dNIN.KILIM] / šu-u bi-⸢rit⸣ [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 P334261.

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/P334261/..
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/P334261/.

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