It is uncertain who sent no. 76 to the king - the sender's name is partly broken away - but he may have been a scholar. On the other hand , a provincial governor such as Marduk-belu-uṣur, governor of Amedi[[132]] and eponym of the year 726, might make excellent sense. In any case, nothing substantial is known for certain about the sender of the letter. Nevertheless, the letter seems to provide us with a rare and dramatic insight into scholarly input from the eighth century BC.[[133]] As is well known, many seventh century letters sent to kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal exemplify the influence some scholars had in royal decision-making ,[[134]] but at the same time we are left almost completely in the dark about the frequency of correspondence between the king of Assyria and his scholarly advisers in the eighth century BC.
Moreover, the importance of no. 76 lies in the fact that it provides indirect evidence of the use of divinatory methods before the reigns of Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal in the seventh century. Despite the lack of direct early evidence, divinatory methods, especially extispicy, must have been part and parcel of the decision-making tools of powerful Mesopotamian and Syrian rulers from at least the early second millennium BC.[[135]]
At any rate, what makes no. 76 especially tantalizing is that it shares some topical parallels with a well-known letter SAA 10 112 (K 1353)[[136]] from the Babylonian scholar Bel-ušezib who served under Sennacherib and Esarhaddon. In both cases the authors (or perhaps a sender in the case of no. 76) try to persuade the king to attack an enemy country located either in the north or northeast. The urge is formulated much more succinctly in no. 76 than in SAA 10 112: in the former, it takes up lines 4-11 at most and the urge to attack Uraṭu is not repeated in the letter. In SAA 10 112, however, Bel-ušezib's encouragement to the king with regard to the auspicious circumstances for an attack against Mannea takes up almost the whole obverse of this long letter.
A more concrete parallel is attested in the phrase (no . 76:10 issurri šarru bēlī har-ba-na-te ... "Perhaps the king, my lord, will retrieve and give back the ruins of [...].") which also occurs in another letter from Bel-ušezib ("Let me resettle the ruined lands [...] for the king, and [let...] by the king's = command." SAA 10 109:24). Even if no. 76 is a much shorter and less sophisticated and detailed letter than SAA 10 112, rhetorically the two letters share the same language and goals. However, there is an important difference between the letters: the recommended attack against an enemy country is based on different scholarly disciplines: astrology is the method of SAA 10 112 whereas no. 76 refers to the flight of birds (augury), seemingly providing a decisive impulse for a military campaign against the Urarṭian capital Ṭurušpâ.[[137]]
132Amedi was located immediately to the west of Šubria. For Marduk-belu-uṣur being the governor of Amedi, cf. e.g., Millard Eponyms p. 59 and RINAP l, p. l6f; it is virtually certain that Marduk-belu-uṣur was the governor of Amedi since the basic sequence of eponym holders (Millard Eponyms p. ll, Table 3) was observed at the time.
133 For the date, cf. Radner Macht p. 95 and SAA 5, xxxii (no. 76 = NL 45).
134 See now, e.g., Radner, "Royal Decision-Making: Kings, Magnates and Scholars.'' inOHCC pp. 358-379.
135 See e.g. Koch (p. 45) and Richardson (pp. 225-266) in Annus Divination.
136 For a study of the letter, see Lanfranchi, SAAB 3 (1989) 99ff.
137 The role that these Syro-Anatolian specialists played at the Assyrian court has recently been discussed by Radner, Festschrift Parpola p. 226ff.
Mikko Luukko
Mikko Luukko, 'In Incident with Scholarly Input', The Correspondence of Tiglath-Pileser III and Sargon II from Calah/Nimrud, SAA 19. Original publication: Winona Laka, IN, Eisenbrauns, 2012; online contents: SAAo/SAA19 Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2021 [http://oracc.org/saao/saa19/babyloniaandthemukizerirebellion/inincidentwithscholarlyinput/]