Position in chronology
SAA 04 120. Fragment of a Military Query (PRT 063) [military and political]
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 4(Beginning destroyed) (1) [...... of] Assyria? (2) [Will he who can see, see it? Will he who can hear, hear it? Does your gr]eat [divinity] know it? (3) [Disregard what (happens) after] my stip[ulated term]. (4) [Disregard that they th]ink [it over, turn back, and le]ave it. (5) [Disregard that an unclean person] has performed extispicy [in this place]. (r 1) [Disregard that an unclean man or woman has come near the place of the extispicy and made it un]clean. (r 2) [Disregard that the ram (offered) to your divinity for the performance of the extispicy is deficient or fa]ulty. (r 3)…
State Archives of Assyria, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
[x x x x x x x x x x x x x] ⸢KUR⸣—AN.ŠÁR / [x x x IGI-ru IGI-ra ŠE-ú ŠE-e DINGIR-ut-ka GAL]-ti ZU-e / [e-zib šá a-na EGIR a-dan]-ni-ia / [e-zib šá it-ti ŠÀ-bi-šú-un i-dab]-⸢bu?⸣-bu-ú / [ú-tar-ru-ú-ma ú]-⸢maš⸣-šá-ru / [e-zib šá i-na KI an-ni-i lu-ʾu-ú] MÁŠ MÁŠ-ú / [e-zib šá lu-ʾu-ú lu-ʾu-ú-tu KI MÁŠ DIB.DIB-ma ú-le-ʾu]-ú / [e-zib šá UDU.NÍTA DINGIR-ti-ka šá a-na MÁŠ MÁŠ-ú LAL-ú ḫa-ṭu]-ú / [e-zib…
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 P240352.
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/P240352/..
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/P240352/.
Related tablets
Related sources
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.
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.
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.