Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 04 117. Fragment of a Military Query (AGS 082) [military and political]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P336068

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 4
High confidence
(Beginning destroyed) (2) [or a str]ong [enemy ...] agai[nst ...] (Break) (r 1) [Disregard that he who touches the forehead of the sheep is dressed in his ordinary soiled garmen]ts. (r 2) [Disregard that the orac]ular query has be[come jumbled in the mouth of the haruspex, your servant].[Let them be taken out and put aside]! (r 3) [I as]k you, [Šamaš, great lord, (r 4) whether ...] or [...... or a str]ong enemy will [att]ack [NN and the army of Esarhaddon, ki]ng of Assyria, (r 7) [kill (and) plunder them, (and whether) Esar]haddon, [king of Assyria, will be troubled and angry]. (Rest destroyed)

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 x x x x x] / [x x x x x x lu-ú LÚ.KÚR dan]-ni a-na [UGU x x x x x] / [e-zib šá TAG-it pu-ut UDU.NÍTA TÚG gi-né-e-šú ár-šá-a]-ti [lab-šú] / [e-zib šá i-na KA DUMU—LÚ.ḪAL ARAD-ka ta]-mit up-[tar-ri-du] / [lu-ú ZI-MEŠ lu-ú BAR-MEŠ a]-⸢šal⸣-ka d[UTU EN GAL-ú] / [ki-i x x x x x x x x]-si lu-ú [x x x x x] / [x x x x x x x lu-ú LÚ.KÚR] ⸢dan⸣-ni a-na ⸢UGU⸣ [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 P336068.

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/P336068/..
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/P336068/.

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