Sennacherib 233
Obverse | ||
11 | m⸢d⸣[30]-PAP.MEŠ-⸢SU⸣ MAN ŠÚ [MAN KUR-AŠ ana md]aš-⸢šur?⸣-PAP-AŠ DUMU-šú GAL? i?-din1 | (1) [Senn]acherib, king of the world, [king of Assyria], gave (this object) [to] Esarhaddon, his senior-ranking son. |
1GAL? i?-din: The reading of the signs after DUMU-šú “his son” is not entirely certain as these signs could also be read as GAL?-i? <id>-din. Esarhaddon was a son of Naqīʾa and Sennacherib, a younger son of the king, a fact attested in his official inscriptions from Nineveh; see, for example, Leichty, RINAP 4 p. 11 Esarhaddon 1 i 8. The adjective rabû (“great”) expresses here Esarhaddon’s seniority in rank, not age. From contemporary sources, we know that Aššur-nādin-šumi was Sennacherib’s eldest son and that Aššur-ilī-muballissu (the tardennu-son) was probably the second oldest. Urdu-Mullissu and likely Aššur-šumu-ušabši are also thought to have been older than Esarhaddon. For a study of Sennacherib’s children, see Frahm, PNA 3/1 pp. 1114–1115 sub Sīn-aḫḫē-erība I.3.b and the introduction to this volume (p. 27). Note that Ashurbanipal, a younger son of Esarhaddon, was also referred to as māru rabû after his official nomination as heir to the Assyrian throne in 672; at that time, his brother Šamaš-šuma-ukīn, the heir designate of Babylon, was probably the king’s eldest living son.
Created by A. Kirk Grayson, Jamie Novotny, and the Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP) Project, 2014. Lemmatized by Jamie Novotny, 2013. The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/ribo/Q004038/.