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This fragment contains portions of two bird oracle reports by the augurs Mudda (§1') and Ura (§2'). A peculiar feature of this oracle tablet is that each bird oracle report includes a few additional lines of text added after the augural response, which normally concludes a report (kola 11–16 and 28–29). Due to their non-standard content and the fragmentary condition of the text, the function of these sections is difficult to determine. Based on the surviving material, they clearly refer to a specific movement of the birds previously described in the oracle and provide some form of commentary on it (see especially k. 11: “[Tha]t one (bird) which flew …”; k. 28 can likely be restored as a sentence with a parallel structure). The passage in k. 11–16 appears to add a further sequence of actions, likely attributed to the bird in question, although this interpretation remains tentative.
Notably, similar features appear in another bird oracle tablet, CTH 573.71, which includes oracles with an identical structure: we find an addendum in §1', after an oracle by the augur Ḫašalli, and another in §2', attributed to an unknown augur. Remarkably, the augurs Mudda (§7') and Ura (§8') also appear on the reverse of CTH 573.71 – the same individuals responsible for the oracles in the present tablet.
Although the two fragments cannot originate from the same tablet, given the markedly different scripts, we may venture to suggest that this distinctive form of oracle reporting is associated with a particular ‘circle’ of augurs, whose reports exhibit idiosyncratic features when compared to the standardized format of typical Hittite bird oracle texts. For other peculiarities of CTH 573.71, see the introduction to the text edition.
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LNS (sjh.); diagnostic signs: AḪ, DA, EN (IIIb/c), ḪA (LNS), ḪAR, IT, KI (LNS).
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