The general date of the corpus is easy to establish: Nos. 1-6 are addressed to Esarhaddon (or his mother, as the mother of the king), nos. 7-11 to Assurbanipal.[[300]] Determining the exact historical contexts and dates of the individual oracles is more difficult, as only one of the texts (no. 9) bears a date, and the circumstances to which the individual oracles relate are as a rule not specified. Almost all the oracles of collections 1-4, for example, refer to the king's distress and/or battle against his enemies, but such references are in general very elusive. The prophecies concerning Elam, Mannea, Urartu and Mugallu of Melid in oracle 2.4 could, in principle, belong to almost any phase of Esarhaddon's twelve-year reign. The promise of victory over [Mel]id and the Cimmerians included in oracle 3.2 is no more specific.
Oracle 1.8, however, offers a concrete, historical fixed point. The first part of it, addressed to the queen mother, contains an unmistakable reference to the time of the murder of Sennacherib (Tebet, 681 BC), when Esarhaddon, the official crown prince, was in exile and his two half-brothers (earlier crown princes) held power in Assyria. [[301]] The end of the oracle, on the other hand, unequivocally refers to Esarhaddon' s triumphal rise to power. It can thus be dated immediately after the end of the civil war, in Adar, 681.
This is a crucially important clue. Clear references to the civil war and the rebel brothers are also found in oracles 3.3 and 3.5. On the other hand, the letters and inscriptions of Esarhaddon inform us that immediately after the war (and possibly already in the course of it, before the decisive battle) the king received encouraging oracles from ecstatic prophets.[[302]] Since encouragement of the king is indeed the central theme of the oracles included in nos. 1, 2 and 4 (and to some extent no. 3 as well), it seems obvious that they are the oracles referred to in the inscriptions. Considering the scarcity of references to prophecies in Esarhaddon' s inscriptions (and Assyrian inscriptions in general), this conclusion can in fact be regarded as virtually certain.
300 Oracle 3.2 is addressed to Assyrians collectively without mentioning the king by name. However, this oraclem unquestionably belongs together with the other oracles of the collection, and the king is certainly identifiable as Esarhaddon from the contents of the oracle.
301 On Sennacherib's murder and the date of Esarhaddon's exile see S. Parpola, "The Murderer of Sennacherib," CRRAI 26 (1980) 171-82, and SAA 6 ( 1991 ), p. XXXIV.
302 See SAA 10 109 = ABL 1216:9 and Appendix, p. LXXIIIf.
Simo Parpola
Simo Parpola, 'The Historical Contexts and Dates of the Oracles', Assyrian Prophecies, SAA 9. Original publication: Helsinki, Helsinki University Press, 1997; online contents: SAAo/SAA09 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2021 [http://oracc.org/saao/saa09/thehistoricalcontextsanddatesoftheoracles/]