Position in chronology
SAA 10 120. Cow Gives Birth to Lion (CT 54 512) [from astrologers]
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 10(Beginning destroyed or too fragmentary for translation) (11) When [...] appeared [...], I said to him: "If you [kill and] eat it, I shall notify the king." (r 2) [Now then] Sin-ereš has struck down the lion which the cow gave birth to and eaten it. None of his associates [knows about it]; he has killed the farmer and the scribe, saying: "Maybe [...] will give you on my behalf; [they may] testify for me in the presence of the king." (r 6) Now then the servants of Sin-ereš who saw it with their own eyes are standing by; let them testify and speak to the king. (r 8) [A ri]tual, be it [by] an exorcist of Sin-ereš [......] (Break) (e. 1) [...] does not [......] (e. 2) [... o]f Nabû-aha-ereš [......] (e. 3) Perhaps [......]
State Archives of Assyria, volume 10 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
⸢x⸣+[x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x] / ⸢x⸣+[x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x] / ⸢x⸣+[x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x] / me [x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x] / [x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x] / ⸢x⸣+[x x x x x x x x x x x x x]-⸢a⸣ / [x x x x x x x x x x x x]+⸢x-da⸣ / [x x x x x x x x x x x x x]-⸢šú⸣ / [x x x x x x x x x x x x]+⸢x-ḫar?-šú⸣ / [x x x x x x x] ⸢ši? x x x x-šú-nu⸣ / [x 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 P237278.
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/P237278/..
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/P237278/.
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.