SAA 04 032. Esarhaddon and Dur-Illil (AGS 020) [military and political]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P240128

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 4

High confidence

(Beginning destroyed) (2) [......]... Will they mount [a dangerous attack on ......], (and) ki[ll and plunder (them)]? (3) [Will Esarhaddo]n, king of Assyria, be troub[led and angry]? (4) [Will he who can see, see it? Will he who can hear, hea]r it? Does yo[ur] great divinity [know it]? (5) [Disregard that the subject of this query, Esarhaddo]n, king of Assyria, [is going] to Dur-Illil. (6) [Disregard that] enemies lie in ambush [at his right and left] and he will be passing through [enemy ambushes]. (7) [Disregard the (formulation) of today's cas]e, be it good, be it faulty, (and that) a…

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

Transliteration

[x x x x x x x x x x x]+⸢x x⸣+[x x x x x x x x x x] / [x x x x x x x x x]+⸢x⸣ GAR*-MEŠ i-⸢duk⸣-[ku-ú i-ḫab-ba-tu-ú] / [ŠÀ-bi šá mAN.ŠÁR—ŠEŠ—SUM]-⸢na⸣ LUGAL KUR—AN.ŠÁR i-mar-⸢ra⸣-[ṣu i-lam-mì-ni] / [IGI-ru IGI-ra ŠE.GA-ú ŠE.GA]-e DINGIR-ut-⸢ka⸣ GAL-[ti ZU-e] / [e-zib šá EN—MU.MU NE-i mAN.ŠÁR—ŠEŠ—SUM]-⸢na⸣ LUGAL KUR—AN.ŠÁR a-na BÀD—dEN.LÍL [il-la-ku] / [e-zib šá KÚR 15-šú u 150-šú i-na DAG]-MEŠ…

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 P240128.

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/P240128/..
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/P240128/.

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