Position in chronology
SAA 10 259. Who to Come out Next? (ABL 0364) [from exorcists]
About this tablet
A letter from two Assyrian court exorcists — Adad-šuma-uṣur and Marduk-šākin-šumi — to their king, most likely Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal (seventh century BCE). The subject is a staffing problem: which scholars have already reported for palace duty and which still owe the king their service. It belongs to the large archive of letters between the Assyrian court and its rotating circle of expert practitioners — physicians, astrologers, diviners, and ritual specialists — who were summoned to Nineveh in turn. The letter is a small but vivid window into how the Assyrian state managed its expert knowledge: by correspondence, with clear accountability to the king, yet with the scholars themselves uncertain about the rotation schedule and deferring to royal authority to sort it out.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
To His Majesty our lord — your servants Adad-šuma-uṣur and Marduk-šākin-šumi write. May Nabû and Marduk bless the king. On the matter of the personnel Your Majesty wrote to us about — you asked whether it was we who had been holding them back. Of those who have already come and reported to us, and of the others who have not yet carried out their assignments: let the latter come forward tomorrow and do their work. Your Majesty already knows who has fulfilled his duties and who has not; we, for our part, honestly cannot say. Under the king's protection, may Bel and Nabû guide them — may they come forward and carry out their work.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineTo the king, our lord: your servants Adad-šuma-uṣur and Marduk-šākin-šumi. May there be well-being for the king, our lord. May Nabû and Marduk bless the king, our lord. Concerning the people about whom the king, our lord, wrote to us — saying: 'Is it not you who have [held] them back?' — those who have already come out to report to us, and the others who have not yet performed [their duties]: let them come out tomorrow and let them perform [them]. The king, our lord, knows which ones have performed [their duties] and which ones have not performed [them]. As for us — what do we know of this? In the protection of the king, may Bel and Nabû guide [them]; may they come out and perform [their work].
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Engine notes
read from photo6 uncertain terms ↓
- a.a-ú-ti / a.a-ʾu-ú-ti — Neo-Assyrian interrogative pronoun, 'who?' or 'which ones?'. The spelling with glottal stop marker is characteristic of late Neo-Assyrian epistolary dialect. Could also carry a sense of 'whoever' (indefinite relative).
- tu-šaḫ*-ka-ma — The asterisk in the transliteration signals a damaged or uncertain sign. Verb from šakānu D-stem or similar; rendered 'are holding back / detaining'. The precise reading is uncertain due to sign damage noted by the editor.
- ina ši-a-ri — 'Tomorrow' (šēru); could also mean 'in the morning'. Context suggests temporal scheduling of personnel duties.
- ina GIŠ.MI LUGAL — Literally 'in the shadow of the king' — a standard formulaic expression for royal protection/patronage. GIŠ.MI = ṣillu, 'shadow, shade, protection'.
- dEN dAG lu-šá-id-du — Bel (= Marduk) and Nabû — the writers invoke divine guidance. lu-šá-id-du from adû/wadû, 'to lead, guide'; the precise nuance ('guide them out', 'direct them') is uncertain in context.
- mdIM—MU—PAB / mdAMAR.UTU—GAR—MU — The senders' names: mdIM—MU—PAB = Adad-šumu-uṣur (well-known exorcist at the Assyrian court); mdAMAR.UTU—GAR—MU = Marduk-šakin-šumi. Both are identified in the SAA 10 prosopography.
Reasoning ↓
Layer 1 (visual): The photograph shows a small lenticular tablet (lens-shaped, ~4–5 cm) with cuneiform on both obverse (upper centre image) and reverse (lower centre image). The clay surface appears well-fired and reddish-brown. The wedge impressions are reasonably clear under photographic lighting, though the resolution is insufficient to read individual signs confidently. The obverse shows densely packed horizontal lines of small Neo-Assyrian script; the reverse likewise. The British Museum accession ink on the bottom edge reads '83-1-18, 34', consistent with BM holdings for ABL 0364 (SAA 10 259). The edges (shown left and right in the top panel) bear additional signs continuing the text. No obvious major physical damage or lacunae are visible; the tablet appears substantially complete. Layer 2 (transliteration): The text is a standard Neo-Assyrian epistolary formula followed by a substantive query about personnel (likely ritual specialists — exorcists, given the series SAA 10). The key crux is 'a.a-ú-ti / ú-ṣu-ni-ni' and cognate phrases — 'a.a-ʾu-ú-ti' is the interrogative 'who?/which ones?' in Neo-Assyrian, referring to which individuals have or have not carried out their duties. Cross-check: Individual signs cannot be verified at this resolution, but the tablet's format and size are consistent with the letter genre as catalogued. The transliteration is drawn from the SAA 10 critical edition (Parpola 1993), which is the standard reference for this text.
Generated by claude-sonnet-4-6 · prompt 2026-05-11/v3-conventions · May 11, 2026 · 3264 in / 1198 out tokens
Transliteration
a-na LUGAL be-lí-ni / ARAD-MEŠ-ka mdIM—MU—PAB / mdAMAR.UTU—GAR—MU / lu-u DI-mu a-na LUGAL / be-lí-ni dAG dAMAR.UTU / a-na LUGAL be-lí-ni / lik-ru-bu / ina UGU UN-MEŠ šá LUGAL / be-lí-ni iš-pur-an-na-ši-ni / ma la at-tu-nu-ú / tu-šaḫ*-ka-ma / a.a-ú-ti ú-ṣu-ni-ni / ša-ni-ʾu-ú-ti / ša la e-pu-šu-u-ni / ina ši-a-ri lu-ṣu-u-ni / le-e-pu-šu / LUGAL be-lí-ni ú-da / a.a-ʾu-ú-ti / e-pu-šu-u-ni / a.a-ʾu-ú-ti / la e-pu-šu-u-ni / a-ni-in-nu / a.a-ka nu-ú-da / ina GIŠ.MI LUGAL dEN / dAG lu-šá-id-du / lu-uṣ-ṣu-u-ni / le-e-pu-šú
Scholarly note
Letter from a scholar (astrologer, exorcist, physician, lamentation-priest) to Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal, edited by Simo Parpola (SAA 10, 1993). ORACC text P334240.
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/P334240/..
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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.