PHILOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

• See also 32.A.9 and 32.S.7. All three omens are almost identical. The Assur and Sultantepe omens both have an enclitic -ma attached to the protases first verb ŠUB-ut. Further, in 32.S.7, ‘evil’ is written as the feminine MUNUS.ḪUL between the protasis’s verbs.
• The above omen is translated in If a City 2 (169, 32.31’) as

         If a lizard falls behind a man (and) strikes, [he will experience evil.]

The verb it-tap-pi-iṣ has been interpreted as a Gtn preterit of napāṣu, which can mean ‘to strike’ or ‘to kick’, but also means ‘to flop around’. The latter seems a more appropriate action for a lizard. Though If a City 2 translates the Nineveh omen’s verb as ‘strikes’ (above), that edition (179, *32.70’; 183, 32.7) translates the verb as ‘flops around’ for both of the Assur and the Sultantepe omens.

We normalize the verb as ittappiṣ as it is written with the final vowel being i. The expected form of the verb is, however, ittappaṣ. For this reason, CAD N/1, 285 s.v. napāṣu A1 lists the attestation in 32.A.9 as uncertain.

• Just as in the Sultantepe sequence, the protases of the above omen and the preceding (32.N.30) have a similar structure. They also share a repetition of the consonant patterns: pslt in the previous omen, tpsl here.