Position in chronology
SAA 10 112. Predicting the Fall of Mannea; Intrigues Against the King (CT 54 022) [from astrologers]
Translation · reference
High confidence(1) [To the king of the la]nds, my lord: your servant Bel-ušezib. May [Bel, Na]bû and Šamaš bless the king, my lord! (3) I saw the crescent of the moon but the sun was rising; he may have cleansed it, but it was not to be seen. (4) Whether it was a crescent, or whether it appeared on the 15th, or whether it will appear on the 16th day, it is an evil portent, and it concerns the Manneans. Wherever an enemy attacks a country, the country will carry this evil portent. (8) Now the army of the king, my lord, having attacked the Manneans, has captured forts, plundered towns and pillaged the open…
Source: Parpola, S. 1993. Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars. SAA 10. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa10/P238052/
Why it matters
Transliteration
[a-na LUGAL] ⸢KUR⸣.KUR be-lí-ia ARAD-ka mdEN—ú-še-zib / [dEN d]⸢AG⸣ u dUTU a-na LUGAL be-lí-ia lik-ru-bu / ⸢us⸣-ka-ru šá d30 a-ta-mar ù dUTU ⸢it-tap⸣-ḫa / ⸢lu?⸣ ú-mar-ri-iq-ma ul in-nam-mar ki-i us-ka-ru / ⸢šu⸣-ú ki-i UD 15-KÁM in-na-mar ù ki-i UD 16-KÁM / in-nam-ma-ru lum-nu-um šu-ú ina UGU KUR.man-na-a.a / šu-ú a-šar LÚ.KÚR ina UGU KUR i-te-eb-bu-ú / KUR ḪUL-nu an-na-a i-zab-bil en-na e-mu-qa /…
Scholarly note
Letter from a scholar (astrologer, exorcist, physician, lamentation-priest) to Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal, edited by Simo Parpola (SAA 10, 1993). ORACC text P238052.
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/P238052/..
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/P238052/.
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.