Position in chronology
SAA 01 205. The Best Chariot-Fighters in Town (ABL 0154)
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 1(1) To the king, my lord: your servant Zeru-ibni. Good health to the king, my lord! (4) As to Marduk-eriba about whom the king, my lord, wrote to me, if I have put Marduk-eriba in irons, let them release his shackles and put them on my own feet! If not, let them pull the tongue out of the throat of the man who lied to the king, my lord! (11) The brother of Marduk-eriba serves as a palace chariot fighter, and he himself has been with me as a recruit. The deputy of the rab-mūgi officer transferred his elder brother to Arrapha because of [...], and last year he took Marduk-eriba as a…
State Archives of Assyria, volume 1 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
a-na LUGAL be-lí-ía / ARAD-ka mNUMUN—ib-ni / lu DI-mu a-na LUGAL be-lí-ía / šu-uḫ mAMAR.UTU—SU / ša LUGAL be-lí-ía iš-pur-an-ni / šúm-ma mdAMAR.UTU—SU si-par-ri AN.BAR / a-sa-kan si-par-ri AN.BAR-e-šú / ⸢li-ip*⸣-ṭu-ru ina GÌR.2-e-a / liš-ku-nu ú-la-a ⸢ša*⸣ a-na LUGAL be-lí-ía / is-lu-ni EME-šú TAv ḫa-ru-ur-ti-šú / li-iš-du-du-u-ni PAB-šú ša mdAMAR.UTU—SU / ina LÚv.A—SIG ša É.GAL / i-la-as-su-mu ù…
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 P334100.
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/P334100/..
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/P334100/.
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.