Position in chronology
SAA 04 295. Envoys of Assurbanipal Sent to the Cimmerians [military and political]
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 4(Beginning destroyed) (1) [...] flesh [...] (2) [The 'out]side' [rides] upon the 'c[ap']. (3) [The breast]-bone [is split] in the center. (4) [There are ...] unfavorable omens. (5) Unfavorable. (6) [The en]voys of Assurbanipal, king of [Assyria], (7) your [cre]ature, who [wen]t to the Ci[mmerians] and [...] (Rest destroyed)
State Archives of Assyria, volume 4 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
[x x x] ⸢x x x⸣ [x x x x] / [x x x] UZU ⸢x⸣+[x x x x] / [BE SA]-ti UGU U.[SAG MUR U₅] / [BE GAG].⸢ZAG⸣.GA BAR-ma [DU₈] / [x] TAG-MEŠ ina [ŠÀ-bi] / (blank) NU DÙG.⸢GA⸣ [o] / [LÚ.DUMU]-MEŠ—KIN-MEŠ šá mAN.ŠÁR—DÙ—A MAN ⸢KUR⸣—[AN.ŠÁR] / [DÙ-ut] ŠU-ka šá a-na LÚ.⸢gi⸣-[mir-ra-a.a] / [il]-⸢li⸣-ku-ma i-ku-⸢x⸣+[x x x]
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 P238997.
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/P238997/..
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/P238997/.
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