SAA 04 208. Fragment of an Appointment(?) Query (AGS 137) [appointment]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P238998

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 4

High confidence

(Beginning destroyed) (1) [......] will he [ma]ke [common cause with his enemy? Does your great divinity know (it)]? (2) Is it [decr]eed 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]? (3) [Disregard that ......] death (may) occur [...]. (4) [Disregard that ......] they (may) experience [... trou]ble and hardships on the journey. (r 1) [Disregard the (formulation) of today's case, be it good], be it faulty. (r 2) [Disregard that a clean or unclean person has touched the sacrificial…

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

Transliteration

[x x x x x x i-šak?]-⸢ka?⸣-a-na [DINGIR-ut-ka GAL-ti ZU-e i-na SILIM-tim] / [i-na KA DINGIR-ti-ka GAL-ti dUTU EN GAL-ú qa-bi]-i ku-un ⸢IGI-ru IGI⸣-[ra ŠE-ú ŠE-e] / [e-zib šá x x x x x x x x]+⸢x⸣ ÚŠ GÁL!-MEŠ [x x x] / [e-zib šá x x x x x x x x x] ⸢NÍG⸣.GIG ⸢ma⸣-na-aḫ-ti šá KASKAL.2 IGI-MEŠ / [e-zib šá di-in UD-me NE-i GIM DÙG.GA] ⸢GIM⸣ ḫa-ṭu-ú / [e-zib šá KUG lu-ʾu-ú SISKUR.SISKUR TAG-MEŠ ú—lu…

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 P238998.

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/P238998/..
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/P238998/.

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