SAA 04 284. Will the Archers of Assurbanipal Sent to Babylon ...? (EANE 206) [military and political]

~675 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P336163

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 4

High confidence

(Beginning destroyed) (4) The 'increment' [......]. (5) The upper part is mov[able ......]. (6) If the breast-bone [is perforated] in its 'cavity': [defection]. (7) If the coils of the colon are turned (and) [their number] is 16: the gods of my army will [lead it] into strife. (9) Third (extispicy). There are 6 unfavorable omens. (r 1) If the archers whom Assurbanipal, king [of Assyria], [has sent] against [Šamaš-šumu-ukin] to Babylon, (r 5) from the 20th [of the month ......] (r 6) to the 2[0th of the month ......] (r 7) of [this] ye[ar ......] (Rest destroyed)

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

Transliteration

⸢BE⸣ [x x x x x x x x] / BE [x x x x x x x x] / BE [x x x x x x x x] / BE MÁŠ [x x x x x x x] / BE AN.TA ⸢DU⸣-[ik x x x x x x] / BE GAG.ZAG.GA ina SAL.⸢LA*⸣-[šú GAM-iš ZI.GA] / BE ŠÀ.NIGIN 150 GUR-MEŠ 16 [ŠID-MEŠ-šú-nu] / ERIM-ni DINGIR-MEŠ-šá ina IZI.GAR-[MEŠ UŠ-MEŠ-ši] / 03-tum 06 TAG-⸢MEŠ⸣ [GAR] / ki-i LÚ.ERIM-MEŠ LÚ.GIŠ*.[BAN-MEŠ] / šá maš-šur—DÙ—A LUGAL [KUR—aš-šur.KI] / a-na UGU…

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 P336163.

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/P336163/..
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/P336163/.

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