Position in chronology
SAA 04 125. Fragment of a Military(?) Query (PRT 068) [military and political]
Translation · reference
High confidence(1) [Šamaš, great lord, give me] a firm positive answer [to what I am asking you]! (2) [From this day, the ...th day of this month], the month Adar (XII) of ..., [to the ...th day of the month ... of] the coming [year], 40 days [and nights, my stipulated term] — (4) [......] in [...] (Rest destroyed)
Source: 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/P237376/
Why it matters
Transliteration
[dUTU EN GAL-ú šá a-šal-lu-ka] ⸢an⸣-na GI.NA [a-pal-an-ni] / [TA UD-mu NE-i UD x-KÁM šá ITI NE-i] ITI.ŠE.KIN.KUD šá x-⸢ma⸣ [x x x] / [EN UD x-KÁM šá ITI.x šá MU.AN.NA] e-rib-ti 40 UD-MEŠ [40 MI-MEŠ] / [x x x x x x x x x x x x]-MEŠ [x] ⸢GAL?⸣ [x x x x] / [x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x]-tam-ma ⸢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 P237376.
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/P237376/..
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/P237376/.
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.