The tablet has been catalogued as a letter with oracles (CTH 581), but it is not a letter in the proper sense. Having no address formula or other epistolary features it is, instead, a full report of an individual KIN inquiry. The landscape format and the oval shape of the tablet are also more common in texts of oracular content (on this tablet type Waal W. 2015a, 35). On the other hand, it is possible that tablets of this kind were used in epistolary exchanges, for delivering oracle results over a distance, and as ‘attachments’ of a proper letter (Soysal O. 2000a, 85-89).

The text concerns the potential predictive meaning of a dream of the queen, where she had seen “witchcraft” against the wife of a certain Ḫaranziti. The obverse contains the oracular question, which reaches the lower edge of the tablet. The oracle report, written on the reverse, established that the sign was not negative, thus excluding that the dream warned of mortal danger for the woman.

Mouton A. 2007a, 220-221; Mouton A. 2007b, 551-555; Warbinek L. 2019a, 159-161; Warbinek L. 2020a, 307-308.

Autography: H.G. Güterbock (KBo 18).

Small rounded tablet, oval-shaped, written in landscape orientation. Fully preserved.

NS (jh.), according to S. Košak’s Konkordanz on HPM.

A palaeographic analysis is not entirely conclusive, also due to the size of the text. The form of TAR might be recent (NS); it is not clear whether DA has simple or broken horizontal. Other signs have, possibly, earlier forms: IT (with the reading value TI₈ ‘eagle’) with broken horizontal, MAḪ (MS form), and ḪAR, not obviously late either. On the other hand, the abundance of Sumerographic writing in the KIN oracle report also points to a late date.

Remarkable of this tablet is that the obverse (the question) and the reverse (the report and answer) are written in different cuneiform scripts. It appears that the reverse was written after some delay, as evidenced by the features of the script, written when the clay was much drier. Traces of fingerprints (in the bottom right part of the obverse) and surface depressions in correspondence to thick clusters of wedges (e.g. the sign ḪAR) indicate that the clay was quite soft while the obverse was written, whereas the appearance of the script in the reverse is easy to correlate with a significantly hardened surface at the time of writing.

Soysal O. 2000a, 88–89 considered that the scripts probably belong to the same scribe, which is possible, even though this remains difficult to determine with certainty, given that the different writing conditions might be to some degree impactful on the aspect of the script. Differently, Mouton A. 2007b, 552–553 considered the scripts more likely to belong to two different scribes.

A discussion of this and other oracle tablets with multiple scripts in Trameri A. forth.