Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 04 196. Should Prince Assurbanipal Frequent the Holy Places? (AGS 143) [medical]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P336111

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 4
High confidence
(Beginning destroyed) (1) [Assurbanip]al, the crown prince o[f the Succession Palace, who for ma]ny [days], month after month, has day and night been moan[ing before your great divinity, O Šamaš, gr]eat [lord, and (whom) your great divinity knows] — (4) [in accordance with the com]mand of your great divinity, Šamaš, great lord, and [your favorable deci]sions, should the subject of this query, Assurbanipal, the crown prince of the [Succession Pal]ace, (6) [b]e it for himself or for his father Esarhaddon, take [the hand of a god, or] the hand of a goddess, or the hand of their (personal) god,…

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

Transliteration

[mdaš-šur—DÙ—DUMU].UŠ DUMU—LUGAL ⸢šá⸣ [É—re-du-ti] / [šá x x x x]-MEŠ-ti ITI a-na ITI [i-na ma-ḫar DINGIR-ti-ka GAL-ti dUTU] / [EN] ⸢GAL⸣-ú UD-mu u MI i-nam-⸢zi⸣-[zu-ma DINGIR-ut-ka GAL-ti ZU-u] / [GIM] ⸢KA⸣ DINGIR-ti-ka GAL-ti dUTU EN GAL-ú ù EŠ.⸢BAR⸣-[ka] / [šal-mu] EN—MU.MU NE-i mdaš-šur—DÙ—DUMU.UŠ DUMU—LUGAL šá ⸢É⸣—[re-du-ti] / [lu]-⸢ú⸣ a-na šá-a-šú lu-ú a-na mdaš-šur—ŠEŠ—SUM-na AD-šú ⸢lu⸣-[ú…

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 P336111.

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/P336111/..
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/P336111/.

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