Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 04 262. Should Šamaš-šumu-ukin Escort the Statue of Marduk to Babylon? (AGS 149) [cultic]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P238966

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 4
High confidence
(1) [Šamaš, great lord, give m]e a firm [positive answ]er [to what I am asking you]! (2) [Should Šamaš-šumu-ukin, son of Esarhad]don, king of [Assyria, within this year] seize the [han]d of the great lord [Marduk i]n the Inner City, and should he lead [Bel] to Babylon? Is it pleasing to your [great] divinity and to the great lord, Marduk? (7) Is it acceptable to your great divinity and to the great lord Marduk? Does your great divinity know it? [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…

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] / [mdGIŠ.NU₁₁—MU—GI.NA DUMU mdaš-šur—ŠEŠ]—⸢SUM⸣-na LUGAL ⸢KUR⸣—[aš-šur.KI] / [i-na ŠÀ MU.AN.NA NE-ti qa]-⸢at⸣ EN GAL-i d[AMAR.UTU] / [i]-⸢na⸣ ŠÀ-bi—URU.KI li-iṣ-bat-ma a-na i-na pa-⸢an⸣ [dEN] / a-na KÁ.DINGIR.RA.KI lil-lik UGU DINGIR-ti-ka [GAL-ti] / ù UGU dEN GAL-i dAMAR.UTU DÙG.GA / pa-an DINGIR-ti-ka GAL-ti ù pa-an dEN GAL-i /…

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 P238966.

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/P238966/..
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/P238966/.

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