Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 04 115. Fragment of a Military Query (PRT 039) [military and political]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P240300

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 4
High confidence
(Beginning destroyed) (1) [... will they at]tack (him), and [kill (and) plunder (him)]? [Will Esarhaddon], king of Assyria, be troubled and [angry]? (3) [Will he who can see, see it? Will he who can hear], hear it? Does your great divinity [know it]? (4) [Disregard that an angry man, or one in dis]tress, [spoke] angrily the words of his report. (5) [Disregard that enemies sit in am]bush [on his right and left]. (Rest destroyed)

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

Transliteration

[i-ma]-⸢qu-tu-ú i*⸣-[duk-ku-ú i-ḫab-ba-tu-ú] / [ŠÀ-bi šá mAN.ŠÁR—ŠEŠ—SUM-na] LUGAL KUR—AN.ŠÁR i-mar-ra-ṣu [i-lam-mì-ni] / [IGI-ru IGI-ra ŠE.GA]-ú ŠE-e DINGIR-ut-ka GAL-[ti ZU-e] / [e-zib šá šab-su ra-aʾ-bu uš]-šú-šú a-mat ṭè-mi-šú ir-⸢ʾu-bu⸣ [id-bu-bu] / [e-zib šá KÚR 15-šú u 150-šú ina DAG-MEŠ] ⸢táḫ⸣-sa-a-⸢ti⸣ [áš-bu-ma]

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 P240300.

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/P240300/..
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/P240300/.

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