Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 04 114. Fragment of a Military Query (PRT 032) [military and political]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P237412

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 4
High confidence
(Beginning destroyed) (b.e. 1) [Month] Sivan, 16th [day ......]. (b.e. 2) Nadinu and [Tabnî]. (r 1) [I ask] you, [Šamaš, great lord, whether, (should) Assurbanipal, son of] Es[arhaddon, king of Assyria, send ...... together with troops and] ho[rses ......] (Rest destroyed)

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

Transliteration

[ITI].SIG₄ UD 16-[KÁM x x x x x x x x] / [m]na-di-nu u [x x x x x x x x x] / [a-šal]-ka [dUTU EN GAL-ú ki-i mdaš-šur—DÙ—DUMU.UŠ] / [DUMU] md[aš-šur—ŠEŠ—SUM-na LUGAL KUR—aš-šur.KI x x x x] / [x x] ⸢an?⸣ ba ⸢x⸣+[x x x x x x x x x x x] / [a-di ERIM-MEŠ] ⸢ANŠE⸣.[KUR.RA-MEŠ x x x x x x x x]

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 P237412.

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/P237412/..
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/P237412/.

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