Position in chronology
SAA 10 225. High Moon (ABL 0894) [from exorcists]
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 10(1) To the king, [my lo]rd: your servant Adad-[šumu-uṣur]. Good health to the king, [my lord]! May Aššur, Sin, Šamaš, [Nabû, Marduk] and the great gods of heaven [and earth] very greatly bless the king, my lord! (8) I observed the (crescent of the) moon on the 30th day, but it was high, too high to be (the crescent) of the 30th. Its position was like that of the 2nd day. If it is acceptable to the king, my lord, let the king wait for the report of the Inner City before fixing the date. (r 6) Perhaps the king, my lord, will say: "Why did you not decide (about the matter)?" — (r 9) am I [...]...[...]? (r 10) Let the king [ask] the scri[bes]; the days [...] (r 14) (Remainder lost)
State Archives of Assyria, volume 10 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na LUGAL be-[lí-ia] / ARAD-ka mdIM—[MU—PAB] / lu-u DI-mu ana LUGAL [EN-ia] / aš-šur d30 dUTU d[AG dAMAR.UTU] / DINGIR-MEŠ GAL-MEŠ šá AN-e [KI.TIM] / a-na LUGAL be-lí-ia / a—dan-niš a—dan-niš lik-ru-bu / d30 UD 30-KÁM / a-ta-mar šá-qi-a / ša UD 30-KÁM / ina pi-it-ti i-šá-qi-a / ki-i šá UD 02-KÁM / iz-za-az / šum-ma ina IGI LUGAL EN-ía / ma-ḫi-ir / ina IGI šá URU.ŠÀ—URU / LUGAL lid-gul /…
Scholarly note
Letter from a scholar (astrologer, exorcist, physician, lamentation-priest) to Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal, edited by Simo Parpola (SAA 10, 1993). ORACC text P334614.
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/P334614/..
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/P334614/.
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.