PHILOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

• The manuscript’s hand copy shows a Winkelhaken and a wedge head at the end of the line. These are omitted by If a City 2 (188, 32.79).
• As the previous Sultantepe omen corresponds with 32.A.80’, it would not be surprising if the above omen corresponds to 32.A.81’. There are difficulties in reconciling the two, however, not least because the Assur omen has NA ‘man’, not MUNUS ‘woman’ in the protasis (but see the commentary at the Assur omen as there are problems with that omen’s protasis). The Sultantepe apodosis also does not include all the signs of the Assur omen’s apodosis. Nevertheless there are similarities that should be considered if the Sultantepe manuscript could be collated. We very tentatively suggest the following reconstruction:

[DIŠ EME.ŠID ana^? Ú]R^? MUNUS KU₄ MUNUS BI KI.Ḫ[UL^? …]
[If a lizard] crawls [into^?] a woman’s [la]p^? — that woman: m[ourning^? …]

• This is the final omen on the obverse of SU 1952, 242.

The manuscript includes a colophon. The colophon is notable because it provides a reference to a text having been copied from a DUB.GAL.LI ‘(exceptionally) large tablet’. These large manuscripts would have preserved entire compositions from various genres, including omen lists. While the few examples of ṭupgallu that have been found to date are incomplete, existing fragments indicate that each side of the large clay tablet might have had five or six columns of 150 lines each, written in small script (Abusch and Schwemer 2009, 53).

The colophone reads: 

[… omens fr]om a large tablet, a copy from Ba[bylon]

[… T]A ŠÀ DUB.GAL.LI GABA.RI TI[N.TIR^ki ]

[… iš]tu libbi ṭupgalli gabarê b[ābili]