Position in chronology
SAA 04 033. Will the Army of Assyria Defeat the Manneans? (AGS 041) [military and political]
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 4(1) [Šamaš, great lord], give me a firm [positive answer to what I am asking you]! (2) [Should NN, chief eunuch of Esar]haddon, king of Assyria (3) [......] Mannea, in the district of (4) [......] wage war? (5) [If he goes and ..., will the weapons and army] of Esarhaddon, king Assyria, (6) [prevail], overwhelm and be victorious over [the weapons of ...]? (Break) (r 1) [May (this query) go to your great divinity, O Šamaš, great lord, and may an orac]le be given as an answer. (r 2) [......] the small 'finger.' (r 3) [......] first extispicy. (r 4) [......] is split and resembles a 'weapon'-mark. (r 5) [......] The left 'side' is present. The breast-bone is thick.
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 / [x x x x x LÚ.GAL—SAG-MEŠ mdaš-šur]—ŠEŠ—SUM-na LUGAL KUR—aš-šur.KI / [x x x x x x x x x x x x x x] KUR.man-na-a.a i-na na-ge-e / [x x x x x x x x x x x x x mi]-taḫ-ṣu-tu li-pu-šú / [x x x x x x x x x GIŠ.TUKUL-MEŠ ERIM]-MEŠ šá mdaš-šur—ŠEŠ—SUM-na LUGAL KUR—aš-šur.[KI] / [ana UGU GIŠ.TUKUL-MEŠ x x x x x i-mar-ri-ir]-ú i-dan-nin-ú…
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 P336052.
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/P336052/..
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/P336052/.
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