SAA 01 011. Building a Private Army (ABL 0304)[via saao/saa01]
Obverse | ||
o 1o 1 | (1) The king's word to Mannu-ki-Adad: | |
o 22 | 01 lim 01 me 19 LÚv.ERIM-MEŠ KALAG-MEŠ | (2) 1,119 able-bodied men — all together they were 5,000 persons, those of them who have died have died, and those who are alive are alive — were given to the exempts of the Palace and entrusted as charges to your care. So why are you appropriating them, turning some to recruits, others to chariot-men, and others again to cavalrymen, into your own regular troops? |
o 33 | ||
o 44 | ||
o 55 | ||
o 66 | ||
o 77 | ||
o 88 | ||
o 99 | ||
o 1010 | ||
o 1111 | ||
o 1212 | ||
o 1313 | (13) Have you not said to yourself: "When the time comes for me to summon them, to whose house shall I go for help?" | |
o 1414 | ||
o 1515 | ||
o 1616 | ||
o 1717 | ||
o 1818 | (18) I am writing to you right now: You have sent many of them to the south and to the north or wherever on (various) errands; summon them wherever they are, they must be there before my eunuch arrives. I shall now send my eunuch to make a review of them. | |
o 1919 | ||
Reverse | ||
r 1r 1 | ||
r 22 | ||
r 33 | ||
r 44 | ||
r 55 | ||
r 66 | ||
r 77 | ||
r 88 |
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/P334193/.