Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 04 025. Esarhaddon Sending his Messenger to NN (AGS 026) [military and political]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P238995

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 4
High confidence
(1) [Šamaš, great lord], giv[e me a fi]rm [positive answer to what I am asking you]! (2) [Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, who is now inten]t [on sending] words of [his own choo]sing [in the hand of his messenger to NN, king of the ...e]ans, (Break) (r 1) [... of] this [month], the month [...]. (r 2) [May (this query) g]o [to your great divinity, O Šamaš, great lord], and may an oracle be [given as an answer].

State Archives of Assyria, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).

Transliteration

[dUTU EN GAL-ú šá a-šal-lu-ka an-na GI].NA a-pal-[an-ni] / [mAN.ŠÁR—ŠEŠ—SUM-na LUGAL KUR—AN.ŠÁR šá i-na-an-na] dib-ba šá ŠÀ-⸢ba⸣-[šú ub-lam] / [ina ŠU.2 LÚ.A—KIN-šú a-na mx x x x KUR.x x-a].a ana KIN-šú-ma ⸢ti⸣-[iṣ-mu-ru-ma] / [x x x x x x x x x x x x ITI] NE-im ITI.[x x x] / [UGU DINGIR-ti-ka GAL-ti dUTU EN GAL-ú DU]-ik-ma UR₅.ÚŠ ⸢li⸣-[tap-pal]

Scholarly note

Extispicy query addressed to Šamaš, the sungod and patron of divination, edited by Ivan Starr (SAA 4, 1990). The king asks the deity to render a yes/no verdict on a political or military question. ORACC text P238995.

Attribution

Image: Adapted from Ivan Starr, Queries to the Sungod: Divination and Politics in Sargonid Assyria (State Archives of Assyria, 4), 1990. Lemmatised by Mikko Luukko, 2018, 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/P238995/..
Translation excerpted from Starr, I. 1990. Queries to the Sungod: Divination and Politics in Sargonid Assyria. SAA 4. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa04/P238995/.

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