Position in chronology
SAA 01 098. Cutting Timber with the Chief Eunuch (ABL 0484)
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 1(1) To the king, our lord: your servants Ṭab-ṣill-Ešarra and Na'di- ilu. Good health to the king, our lord! (5) As to what the king, our lord, wrote to us: "While you were here, I gave you this order: 'You will first go to Lurisite and choose strong and good-looking timber; later you will take woodcutters down to do the cutting within (the said area)'" — (13) the king did give us (this) order, but as we [ca]me to the city of Aššur, the Chief Eunuch [with x] men [...... (Break) (r 1) "......] to return [to] Samarra; should the men stay inactive for eight days?" (r 5) We took the men downstream, and they are now cutting (the timber). We shall cut within the area which the king set to us, and (then) go; we shall leave the best stems [in] the grove (when) we go.
State Archives of Assyria, volume 1 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na LUGAL EN-ni / ARAD-MEŠ-ka mIM*—ṣil—É.ŠÁR.RA / mI—DINGIR / lu DI-mu a-na LUGAL EN-ni / ša LUGAL EN-ni iš-pur-an-na-ši-ni / ma-a ki-i an-na-ka at-ta-nu-ni / ma-a ṭè-e-mu a-sa-kan-ku-nu / ma-a taḫ-ru-ba a-na URU.lu-ri-si-te / tal-la-ka ma-a GIŠ.ÙR-MEŠ / KALAG.GA-MEŠ SIG₅-MEŠ ta-⸢mar⸣ / ma-a ḫa-ra-ma-ma LÚv.na-ki-su-te / tú-⸢še⸣-ra-da ina ŠÀ-bi i-na-ki-su / LUGAL EN-ni ṭè-e-mu i-sa-kan-na-ši /…
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 P334332.
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/P334332/..
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/P334332/.
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.