Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 04 125. Fragment of a Military(?) Query (PRT 068) [military and political]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P237376

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 4
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)

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

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/.

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