SAA 04 038. Will Scythians and Cimmerians Invade Bit-Hamban and Yašuh? [military and political]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P239367

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 4

High confidence

(Beginning destroyed) (r 2) [whether they will make a hostile incursion to the ...] of Bit-Ha[mban ......], g[o to the city] Yašuh, and ki[ll what there is to kill ......]. (r 4) [Be present] in [this] ram, [place (in it) a firm positive answer ......] (Rest destroyed)

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

Transliteration

[x x x x] du ⸢x⸣+[x x x x x x x x x x x x] / [x x]+⸢x⸣ šá É—URU.ḫa-[am-ban x x x x x x x x] / [URU?].ia-šu-uḫ il-[la-ku-nim-ma šá GAZ GAZ-MEŠ x x x x] / [o?] ⸢i⸣-na ŠÀ-bi UDU.⸢NÍTA⸣ [an-ni-i GUB-za-am-ma an-na GI.NA]

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 P239367.

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/P239367/..
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/P239367/.

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