Position in chronology
SAA 10 154. Messenger of Bel Goes with the King (ABL 0324) [from astrologers]
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 10(1) To the queen mother, my lady: your servant Aplaya. May Bel and Nabû bless the queen mother, my lady! (5) Now then I am daily praying to Nabû and Nanaya for the maintenance of the life and the extension of the days of the king of the lands, my lord, and of the queen mother, my lady. (r 3) The queen mother, my lady, can be of peaceful mind. A gracious angel (lit. messenger) of Bel and Nabû has gone with the king of the lands, my lord.
State Archives of Assyria, volume 10 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na AMA—LUGAL GAŠAN-ía / ARAD-ka mDUMU.UŠ-a / dEN u dAG a-na AMA—LUGAL / GAŠAN-ía lik-ru-bu / a-du-ú UD-mu-us-su / dAG u dna-na-a / a-na ba-la-ṭa / nap-šá-a-ti / ù a-ra-ka UD-mu / šá LUGAL KUR.KUR EN-ía / ù AMA—LUGAL GAŠAN-ía / ú-ṣal-la / AMA—LUGAL GAŠAN-a / lu-ú ḫa-ma-ti / LÚ.A—šip-ri šá du-un-qu / šá dEN u dAG / it-ti LUGAL KUR.KUR / be-lí-ía / it-ta-lak
Scholarly note
Letter from a scholar (astrologer, exorcist, physician, lamentation-priest) to Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal, edited by Simo Parpola (SAA 10, 1993). ORACC text P237822.
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/P237822/..
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/P237822/.
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.