Position in chronology
SAA 10 264. Shall we Bring the Skulls? (ABL 0021) [from exorcists]
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 10(1) To the king, my lord: your servant Marduk-šakin-šumi. Good health to the king, my lord! May Nabû and Marduk bless the king, my lord! (6) May we bring these skulls prescribed in the ritual into the qirsu, clothe them with garments and install them there? Let them write me what the king, my lord, commands.
State Archives of Assyria, volume 10 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na LUGAL be-lí-ía / ARAD-ka mdŠÚ—GAR—MU / lu-u DI-mu a-na LUGAL / be-lí-ia dPA dAMAR.UTU / a-na LUGAL be-lí-ia / lik-ru-bu gul-gul-la-te / ši-na šá ina ŠÀ-bi dul-li / qa-bu-u-ni / nu-še-ri-ba-a / ina qir-si / ku-zip-pi nu-šá-URU*-bi*-iš* / ina ŠÀ-bi ni-iš-kun / mi-i-nu šá LUGAL / be-lí i-qab-bu-u-ni / liš-pur-u-ni
Scholarly note
Letter from a scholar (astrologer, exorcist, physician, lamentation-priest) to Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal, edited by Simo Parpola (SAA 10, 1993). ORACC text P333973.
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/P333973/..
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/P333973/.
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.