Position in chronology
SAA 01 047. Moving the Army Across a River (ABL 0100)
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 1(1) To the king, my lord: your servant Ṭab-šar-Aššur. Good health to the king, my lord! (4) As to what I wrote to the Palace: "Let them [...] the rivers, get together and do the crossing at ... the c[am]p," — Arbailai the 'third man' came to me today, reporting: "The river is [floodin]g, I was not able to pass [...] to the [other] side." (14) That is exactly why I wrote to the Palace. Let them now do the crossing at that very place outside the ca[mp]. (r 1) And here — (when) they come [......], half of the [......] ... here; I went by a cart and had a look; it's excellent, and Arbailai showed…
State Archives of Assyria, volume 1 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na LUGAL EN-ia / ARAD-ka mDÙG—IM—aš-šur / lu DI-mu a-na LUGAL EN-ia / ša ina É.GAL áš-pur-an-ni / nu-uk ÍD-MEŠ lu-⸢x⸣+[x]-⸢ru*⸣ / li-ki-ri-ku ina ⸢x ma?-dak?⸣-te* / né-bu-ru le-⸢pu⸣-[šu] / ú-ma-a marba-ìl-[a.a] / LÚv.03.U₅ it-[tal-ka] / ma-a ÍD ina* [me-li]-⸢šú?⸣ / ⸢i*⸣-ba*-ši a-[x x x]-⸢i⸣ / a-na-ku ina bat-⸢ti⸣ [am-mi]-⸢ti*⸣ / la e-ti-iq [la al-lik] / ina UGU-ḫi šú-u ina ⸢É*.GAL*⸣ / a-sa-par…
Scholarly note
Royal correspondence under Sargon II, edited by Simo Parpola (SAA 1, 1987). Letter from a governor or high official to the king of Assyria. ORACC text P334049.
Attribution
Image: Adapted from Simo Parpola, The Correspondence of Sargon II, Part I: Letters from Assyria and the West (State Archives of Assyria, 1), 1987. Lemmatised by Mikko Luukko, 2009-11, as part of the AHRC-funded research project “Mechanisms of Communication in an Ancient Empire: The Correspondence between the King of Assyria and his Magnates in the 8th Century BC” (AH/F016581/1; University College London) directed by Karen Radner. The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/saao/P334049/..
Translation excerpted from Parpola, S. 1987. The Correspondence of Sargon II, Part I: Letters from Assyria and the West. SAA 1. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa01/P334049/.
Related tablets
Related sources
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.
Part of the earliest known body of international diplomatic correspondence. Akkadian, written in cuneiform on clay, was the lingua franca of Late Bronze Age statecraft — used between Egypt, the Hittites, Mitanni, Babylon, Assyria, and the Levantine vassals.