Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 04 184. Fragment Mentioning the King’s Illness (CT 54 406) [medical]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P240326

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 4
High confidence
(Beginning destroyed) (1) [Will he who can see, see it? Will he who] can hear, he[ar it? Does your great divinity know it]? (2) [Disregard that ...] the king is ill ...[......]. (3) [Disregard the (formulation) of the prayer for today's] case, be it good, [be it faulty]. (4) [Disregard that the ram (offered) to] your [divinity] for the performance of the extispicy [is deficient or faulty]. (5) [Disregard that he who touches the forehead of the sheep is dressed in his ordinary soiled garments ......]. (6) [Disregard that I, the haruspex your servant, am dressed in] my o[rdinary soiled garments ......] (Rest destroyed)

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

Transliteration

[IGI-ri IGI-mar ŠE].⸢GA-ú ŠE⸣.[GA-e DINGIR-ut-ka] / [GAL-ti ZU-e] [e-zib šá x x x x] LUGAL GIG-uṣ DU₈ [x x x x x] / [e-zib šá ik-rib di]-⸢nim⸣ UD-mu NE-i GIM DÙG.⸢GA⸣ [GIM ḫa-ṭu-ú] / [e-zib šá UDU.NÍTA DINGIR-ti]-ka šá ana MÁŠ MÁŠ-ú [LAL-ú ḫa-ṭu-ú] / [e-zib šá TAG-it SAG.KI UDU.NÍTA] TÚG gi-né-e-šú ár-[šá-ti lab-šú] / [e-zib šá a-na-ku DUMU—LÚ.ḪAL ARAD-ka TÚG gi-né]-e-a ár-[šá-ti lab-šá-ku]

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 P240326.

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/P240326/..
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/P240326/.

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