Position in chronology
SAA 01 124. Fending off Accusations (ABL 0190)
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 1(1) [To] the king, my lord: your servant Kiṣir-Aššur. Good health to the king, my lord! (4) As to the houses of the recruitment officers, about which the king, my lord, wrote to me: "The houses are already built, you are deceiving me in order to give them to your servants!" — (8) as if I did not tell the truth to the king, my lord! Let a royal eunuch who will tell the king my lord the truth come and have a look at these houses of the recruitment officers! If they are already built, let him go and tell it to the king, my lord, and let the king, my lord, hold his report to my discredit and say:…
State Archives of Assyria, volume 1 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
[a-na] LUGAL be-lí-ia / ⸢ARAD⸣-ka mki-ṣir—aš-šur / lu šul-mu a-na LUGAL be-lí-ía / ina UGU É-MEŠ ša LÚv.mu-šar-ki-sa-a-ni / ša LUGAL be-lí iš-pur-an-ni ma-a É-MEŠ / ra-aṣ-pa-a-te ši-na ma-a ta-sa-la-ʾa-an-ni / ma-a ba-si ta-⸢da*⸣-ni a-na LÚv.ARAD-MEŠ-ka / TAv ma-ṣi-in ⸢a*⸣-[na]-ku* la ke-e-tu / ina pa-an LUGAL EN-⸢ía ad*⸣-da-bu-ub-ú-ni / LÚv.SAG ša LUGAL EN-ía lil-li-ka / ša ke-e-tu TAv LUGAL…
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 P334135.
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/P334135/..
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/P334135/.
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.