Position in chronology
SAA 10 107. Corruption in the Temple of Aššur (ABL 0429) [from astrologers]
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 10(1) To the king, my lord: your servant Akkullanu. Good health to the king, my lord! May Nabû and Marduk bless the king, my lord! (6) The golden plate which disappeared from the Aššur temple has been seen in the hands of the stonecutter Qurdî-Nergal. Now the gold was for his eyes (i.e., meant for him). I am going to question the scribe now. (r 1) Let the king write again, and let them question him. The king should not write to Ṭab-šar-Sin, (for) he has been bribed by him. Instead let them question him as well: "To whom have you given bribes? Make up for the gold!" (r.e. 12) The king should not let this pass over in silence. Let them at the same time question (all those) who have enjoyed gifts at the expense of the Aššur temple.
State Archives of Assyria, volume 10 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na LUGAL EN-ía / ARAD-ka mak-kul-la-nu / lu-u šul-mu a-na LUGAL / EN-ía dPA u dAMAR.UTU / a-na LUGAL EN-ía lik-ru-bu / le-ʾu-u ša KUG.GI / ša TAv É—aš-šur ZÁḪ-u-ni / ina ŠU.2 mqur-di—U.GUR / LÚ.BUR.GUL it-ta-mar / an-nu-rig KUG.GI / a-na IGI.2-MEŠ-šú / ù LÚ.A.BA / an-nu-rig / a-šá-ʾa-al / LUGAL tu*-ú*-⸢ra*⸣ / liš-pu-ra liš-ú-lu-šú / a-na mDÙG—IM—d30 / LUGAL lu la i-šap-pa-ra / šul-ma-nu TAv…
Scholarly note
Letter from a scholar (astrologer, exorcist, physician, lamentation-priest) to Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal, edited by Simo Parpola (SAA 10, 1993). ORACC text P334295.
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/P334295/..
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/P334295/.
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.