Position in chronology
SAA 01 177. Organizing a Post Station (ABL 0414)
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 1(1) To the king, my lord: your servant Bel-liqbi. Good health to the king, my lord! (4) The town of Hēsa, a road station of mine, lacks people; the postmaster and the commander of the recruits are there alone and cannot attend to it (properly). Now, let me get together 30 families and place them there. There are men of Nabû-ṣalla the prefect living in Hēsa, a cohort of craftsmen; let him move them out, settle them in the town of Argite, and give them fields and gardens. (17) If it is acceptable to the king, my lord, let them send a letter to Nabû-uṣalla the prefect, and let me appoint Ia'iru…
State Archives of Assyria, volume 1 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na LUGAL EN-ia / ARAD-ka mEN—liq-bi / lu DI-mu a-na LUGAL EN-ia / URU.ḫe-e-sa É—mar-di-ti-ia* / UN-MEŠ ina ŠÀ-bi la-áš-šú / LÚv.GAL—kal-li-e : LÚv.GAL—rak-si / ú-di-šú-nu ina ŠÀ-bi la-a i-ḫa-ri-du / ú-ma-a a-na-ku 30 É-MEŠ / lu-šá-bi-šá ina ŠÀ-bi la-áš-ku*-nu / ERIM*-MEŠ ša mdPA—ṣal-la LÚv.GAR-nu / LÚv.DUMU—ki-⸢it*-ki*⸣-te-e 01-en / LÚv.ki-ṣir ina ŠÀ-bi URU.ḫe-e-sa / kam-mu-su lu-še-ṣi-šú-nu /…
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 P334284.
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/P334284/..
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/P334284/.
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.