PHILOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

• The above omen is translated in If a City 2 (179, *32.67’) as

         [If a lizard] falls […]—attainment of his desire.

Although the subject of the apodosis is likely to be the man mentioned in the protasis, the possessive pronoun ‘his’ is not present in the original text.

• The signs Á.ÁŠ, translated above as ‘objective’, have a broad semantic meaning including ‘desire’ or ‘purpose’ or ‘business venture’ (See CAD Ṣ, 167–71 s.v. ṣibûtu A). With the verb kašādu, as above, the sense is often of ‘objective’ or ‘goal’. As De Zorzi (2009, 97-103 particularly 98-99) notes in her discussion of the word ṣibûtu, in divinatory texts the term is to be understood broadly as an “undertaking”, but the evidence from outside of divinatory texts give the term a connotation of “business venture”.