PHILOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

• See also 32.S.33, which has been used to reconstruct the above apodosis. The two omens appear to be the same, except that the Sultantepe apodosis adds GIG BI ‘that sick man’.
• The reading Š[UB-u]t follows KAL 1’s (16-17 Vs. 33 A33) reading of the line as only a vertical wedge is visible on the manuscript’s photograph. Further the hand-copy of 32.S.33 (see previous comment) also shows the apodosis’s verb to be ŠUB-ut.

The meaning of ŠUB-ut at the end of the apodosis, however, is uncertain. It is a form of the verb maqātu, which in the context of disease, usually means ‘to afflict’ (CAD M/1, 248 s.v. maqātu 4b), as KAL 1 (16-17, 72 Vs. 33) translates the above omen:

Wenn eine Eidechse auf das Bett eines kranken Mannes fällt: Seine Krankheit wird (ihn) be[fall]en.

The edition If a City 2 (181, *32.94’), on the other hand, translates the above omen as follows:

         If a lizard falls onto the bed of a sick man, his sickness [will fall (away)].

In some contexts, such as mathematics, maqātu can mean ‘to diminish’ (CAD M/1, 244 s.v. maqātu 1h). This is likely the reason for If a City 2’s translation.

As written ŠUB-ut could stand for the present tense imaqqut. But as the man is already sick (as noted in the protasis), it contextually makes little sense that illness would befall him in the future.

We have therefore interpreted the omen as a diagnostic omen and the verb as the preterit. There are several medical-diagnostic omens involving lizards in the series SA.GIG (for a discussion, see the commentary at 32.S.34), and, in many ways, the SA.GIG omens mirror the omens in Šumma ālu (Heeßel 2001, 24). The above omen, however, does not have a parallel among the SA.GIG omens. For the SA.GIG omen that If a City 2 (180, n. 94’) mentions as a possible parallel (Labat 1951, 10–11 TDP 2: 44 and n. 18), see now Heeßel (2001, 32 44), whose collation of additional SA.GIG manuscripts shows that omen’s protasis does not correspond to Assur 33’s protasis.

Another possibility is that the damaged signs on the Assur manuscript do not read ŠUB-ut, but are instead signs such as ZI ‘to live’ (less likely as the sign does not much resemble ŠUB) or TAG4 ‘to leave’. See 32.S.34 for an example of the latter. This possibility presents its own problems. As mentioned above, 32.S.33 is almost an exact match for the above omen. If the apodosis was read to be positive (in that the man would live or his illness leave him), this would conflict with Sultantepe’s thematic pair 32.S.34, whose apodosis is a positive prognosis for an illness. The two omens have opposing protases and so one would expect the apodoses to also oppose.

• The commentary at 32.N.11 lists the lizard omens involving illness.