Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 04 122. Fragment of a Military Query (AGS 022) [military and political]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P238987

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 4
High confidence
(Beginning destroyed) (2) [......] Will he place [......]? (3) [...] Will it be delivered [to him]? (4) [Does your great divinity know it? Will he who can see, see it? Will he who can he]ar, hear it? (5) [Disregard the (formulation) of today's case, be it good, be it fa]ulty. (6) [Disregard that a clean or an unclean person has touched the sacrificial sheep, o]r blocked [the way of the sacrificial sheep]. (7) [Disregard that an unclean man or woman has come near the place of the extispicy and made it un]clean. (r 1) [Disregard that an unclean person has performed extisp]icy [in this place].…

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

Transliteration

[x x x x x x x x x x x x] tab [x x x] / [x x x x x x x x x x x x]-an-di i-šak-⸢ka-a⸣-[na] / [x x x x x x x x x x x x] i-man-ni-i / [DINGIR-ut-ka GAL-ti ZU-e a-mi-ru im-ma-a-ra še]-mu-ú i-šem-mé-e / [e-zib šá di-in UD NE-i GIM DÙG-ab GIM ḫa]-ṭu-ú / [e-zib šá KUG lu-ʾu-ú UDU.NÍTA TAG-MEŠ ú—lu a-na IGI SISKUR.SISKUR] GIL-MEŠ-ku / [e-zib šá lu-ʾu-ú lu-ʾu-ú-tú KI MÁŠ DIB.DIB-ma ú]-⸢le⸣-ʾu-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 P238987.

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/P238987/..
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/P238987/.

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