Position in chronology
SAA 10 060. Anomaly Omens are Difficult to Read (ABL 0688) [from astrologers]
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 10(1) To the king, my lord: your servant Balasî. Good health to the king, my lord! May Nabû and Marduk bless the king, [my lord]. (5) Concerning the tab[let] of Šumma izbu [about which] the king, my lord, wrote to me: "Look (at it)! [Who would] write [...] in Šumma izbu?" — there is a particular tablet [in] which the [...]s are written, and I am now sending it to the king. The king should have a look. Maybe the scribe who reads to the king did not understand. (r 1) Šumma izbu is difficult to interpret. The first time that I come before the king, my lord, I shall (personally) show, with this tablet that I am sending to the king, my lord, how the omen is written. (r 10) Really, [the one] who has [not] had (the meaning) pointed out to him cannot possibly understand it.
State Archives of Assyria, volume 10 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na LUGAL EN-ia / ARAD-ka mba-la-si-i / lu-u DI-mu a-na LUGAL EN-[ia] / dPA dAMAR.UTU a-na LUGAL [EN-ia] / lik-ru-bu ina UGU ⸢ṭup*⸣-[pi] / ša BE—iz-[bi ša] ⸢LUGAL be-lí⸣ / iš-pur-an-ni ma-a ⸢a⸣-[mur] / ina ŠÀ BE—iz-⸢bi*⸣ e* ⸢x⸣+[x man-nu] / i-šaṭ-ṭar 01-en šu*-[ú] / ṭup-pu* ša ⸢x x x⸣+[x ina ŠÀ]-⸢bi⸣ / šá-aṭ-ṭa-ra-a-ni / an-nu-rig a-na LUGAL / us-se-bi-la / LUGAL le-mu-ur / is—su-ri LÚ.A.BA / šá…
Scholarly note
Letter from a scholar (astrologer, exorcist, physician, lamentation-priest) to Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal, edited by Simo Parpola (SAA 10, 1993). ORACC text P334486.
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/P334486/..
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/P334486/.
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.
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.