Position in chronology
SAA 01 091. Arranging for Reserve Troops (ABL 0094)
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 1(1) To the king, my lord: your servant Ṭab-ṣill-Ešarra. Good health to the king, my lord! May Aššur and Mullissu bless the king, my lord! (6) The king, my lord, wrote to me: "Set out on the 22nd and be in the Inner City on the 29th!" — before I go to the Inner City, let me come and see the king, my lord! (13) And as to the reserves of the king's men of the Ruqahu and Hallatu tribes about which the king my lord wrote to me, I sent (orders about them) on the very day I saw the (king's) letter.
State Archives of Assyria, volume 1 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na LUGAL EN-ía / ARAD-ka mDÙG.GA—ṣil—É.ŠÁR.RA / lu DI-mu a-na LUGAL EN-ía / aš-šur d⸢NIN.LÍL⸣ a-na LUGAL / EN-ia lik-ru-bu / LUGAL be-li* i-sa-ap-ra / ma-a UD 22-KÁM na*-me*-ši / ma-a UD 29-KÁM ina URU.⸢ŠÀ—URU⸣ / lu-u at-ta [o] / a-du i-na URU.ŠÀ—⸢URU⸣ / la al-lak-u-ni / la-li*-ka* LUGAL be*-li / la-mur ù ina UGU / ša ku-tal ERIM—MAN / ša KUR.ru-qa-ḫa-a-a / ša KUR.ḫal-lat-a-a / ša LUGAL EN iš-pur-a-ni / UD-mu šá e-gír-tú / a-mur-u-ni a-sap-[ra]
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 P334043.
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/P334043/..
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/P334043/.
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.