Position in chronology
SAA 01 065. Digging a Ditch (ABL 0102)
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 1(1) [To] the king, my lord: [your servant Ṭab]-šar-Aššur. [Good health] to the king, my lord! (4) Paqaha, the master-builder in charge of the ditch came and had an audience with me, saying: "The king has added to the men working on the ditch but there are no (work) leaders. The governor of Talmusa is not able to direct the men, he said to me as follows: (14) '1,000 men [...... (Break) (r 2) ...... we [can]not do the work.'" (r 3) Paqaha told me: "I (must) personally take the lead of 100 men and spend a full month on the work. Let the king my lord call the leaders to account for the fact that I (must) spend a full month on the work employing (only) 100 men."
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 / [m]⸢pa⸣-qa-ḫa LÚv.TIN / ša pa-an ḫi-ri-te / it-tal-ka ina pa-ni-ia / i-ti-ti-zi ma-a LÚv.ERIM-MEŠ / ina UGU ḫi-ri-te LUGAL ur-ta-di / ma-a LÚv.ra-di-a-ni la-áš-šú / ma-a LÚv.EN.NAM ša URU.tal-mu-sa / ⸢la⸣ e-mu-qa-šú LÚv.ERIM-MEŠ / [la-a] i-ra-di / [ki-i an]-⸢ni⸣-e iq-ṭí-bi-a / [ma-a x x]+⸢x 01*⸣ lim LÚv.ERIM-MEŠ /…
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 P334051.
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/P334051/..
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/P334051/.
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