Position in chronology
SAA 04 099. Fragment Similar to No. 96 (PRT 035) [military and political]
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 4(Beginning destroyed) (2) will they do [battle ......]? (3) [Is it decreed and confirm]ed [in a favorable case, b]y the command of your great divinity, [Šamaš, great lord]? (5) [Will he who can see, see it? Will he who can hear, hea]r it? (6) [Disregard the (formulation) of today's case, be it good, be it fa]ulty. (7) [Disregard that a clean or an unclean person has touched the sacrificial sheep, or] blocked [the way of the sacrificial sheep]. (8) [Disregard that an unclean man or woman has come near the place of the extispicy and made it] unclean. (r 1) [Disregard that an unclean person has…
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⸣-ni [x x x] / [x x x x x x x x x x x x x x] ip-pu-šú-ú / [x x x x x x i-na SILIM-tim i]-⸢na⸣ KA DINGIR-ti-ka GAL-[ti] / [dUTU EN GAL-ú qa-bi-i ku-un]-i / [IGI-ru IGI-ra ŠE.GA-ú ŠE].⸢GA⸣-e / [e-zib šá di-in UD-mu NE-i GIM DÙG.GA GIM ḫa]-⸢ṭu⸣-ú / [e-zib šá KUG lu-ʾu-ú UDU SISKUR.SISKUR TAG-MEŠ ú—lu a-na IGI SISKUR.SISKUR] GIL-MEŠ / [e-zib šá lu-ʾu-ú lu-ʾu-ú-ti KI…
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 P336340.
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/P336340/..
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/P336340/.
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