SAA 04 060. Should Esarhaddon Send his Army against Kaštaritu? (PRT 006) [military and political]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P237027

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 4

High confidence

(1) [Šamaš, great lord, give me a f]irm positive answ[er to what I am asking you]! (2) [From the ...th day of this month], Shebat (XI) of [this year, to the ...th day of Nisan (I) of the] coming [year], 40 days [and nights, my stipulated term] — (4) [within this stipulated term], should [Esarhaddon, k]ing of Assyria, s[trive and plan, and send NN with an army, as he wishes, ag]ainst Kaštari[tu, city lord of Karkaššî]? (6) [If he sends him and he goes, is it pleasing] to [your great] divinity? (Break) (r 1) May (this query) go [to your great divinity, O Šamaš, gre]at [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] / [TA UD x-KÁM šá ITI NE]-⸢i⸣ ITI.ZÍZ.ÀM šá [MU.AN.NA NE-ti EN UD x-KÁM] / [šá ITI.BARAG šá MU.AN.NA e]-rib-tu 40 UD-MEŠ [40 MI-MEŠ ši-kin RI-ia] / [ina ši-kin RI UR₅-tú mAN.ŠÁR—ŠEŠ—SUM-na] ⸢LUGAL⸣ KUR—AN.ŠÁR li-⸢iṣ⸣-[rim lik-pid-ma x x x x] / [a-di e-mu-qí mál ŠÀ-šú ub-lu i-na] ⸢UGU⸣ mkaš-ta-ri-[ti EN—URU šá URU.kar—kaš-ši-i] /…

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 P237027.

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/P237027/..
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/P237027/.

Related tablets

Related sources

~650 BCE

Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI (the Flood)

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.

~2300 BCE

Disk of Enheduanna

The literary tradition is no longer anonymous from this point. Authorship — the idea that a specific human voice composes a specific work — enters the historical record with her.

~1808 BCE

Sumerian King List (Weld-Blundell Prism)

The single most influential Mesopotamian king list — the model for every later attempt to chronicle the deep history of the region. It transmits the political theology of divinely granted kingship, an idea that would echo through Babylon, Assyria, and into the Hebrew Bible. The Weld-Blundell prism (WB 444) at the Ashmolean is the most complete surviving copy.