Position in chronology
SAA 04 190. Will the Queen Mother’s Illness Pass? (AGS 101+) [medical]
Translation · reference
High confidence(1) Šamaš, great lord, give me a firm positive answer to what I am asking you! (2) Niq'a, mother of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, who is now ill, and on whom the 'hand' of god Iqbi-damiq was placed in extispicy — (4) will it pass by unto sacrificial sheep and oxen? (5) If she is ill with this disease, (6) is it decreed and confirmed in a favorable case, by the command of your great divinity, Šamaš, great lord? Will he who can see, see it? Will he who can hear, hear it? (9) Disregard the (formulation) of today's case, be it good, be it faulty. (10) Disregard that a clean or an unclean person…
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/P336081/
Why it matters
Transliteration
⸢d⸣UTU EN GAL-ú šá a-šal-lu-ka an-na GI.NA a-pal-an-ni / MÍ.ni-iq-a AMA mdaš-šur—ŠEŠ—SUM-na LUGAL KUR—aš-šur.KI / šá i-na-an-na mar-ṣa-tu-ma ŠU.2 dDUG₄-bi—SIG₅ / i-na MÁŠ iš-šá-ak-un-ši ina UGU UDU SISKUR.SISKUR-MEŠ GUD-MEŠ DIB-MEŠ / ki-i mur-ṣu an-na-a mar-ṣa-a-tu / i-na SILIM-tim i-na KA DINGIR-ti-ka GAL-ti / dUTU EN GAL-ú qa-bi-i ku-un-ú / IGI-ru IGI-ra ŠE.⸢GA⸣-ú ŠE.GA-e / e-zib šá di-in UD-me…
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 P336081.
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/P336081/..
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/P336081/.
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