CTH 532.6 is a collection of monthly lunar eclipse omens. The text survives on an Akkadian tablet (B: KBo 13.27+) and a passage of a Hittite Sammeltafel (A: KUB 29.9 rev. IV), both fragmentary. There are some thematic and lexical overlaps with CTH 532.2 (KBo 34.118), but no clear connection can be established. The listing of monthly omens is also found in CTH 532.4 and CTH 532.5.

The tablets were copied by H. Otten (KBo 13), H. Ehelolf (KUB 29), and A. Götze (VBoT). Editions can be found with Güterbock H.G. 1957-1958a: 80(A), Riemschneider K.K. 2004a: 39-40(B), Torri G. − Barsacchi F.G. 2018b: 29(B) and Torri G. 2022a: 63 (B colophon).

A: Large piece from the top left obverse and bottom left reverse of a two-column tablet. Contains 29 complete lines of tidy cuneiform script and another 21 damaged lines. The second column’s script is slanted upwards.

B: Two small joining fragments from the end of a tablet with remnants of fourteen lines of neat, spacious script. The join sketch in the online concordance is incorrect: The fragments join vertically, not horizontally.

A: New Script/IIIa: The text uses old LI and middle AḪ and ḪAR, but new AG. DA and ID have a broken central horizontal.

B: Not much is preserved and no diagnostics survive; the sumerograms KI and BURU₁₄ have older rather than younger forms (HZL 274/14 and 313/1). From the scribe’s name we know that the tablet dates to the reign of Ḫattušili III or Tudḫaliya IV (Hout Th.P.J. van den 1995c: 216-225).

The Akkadian witness uses a numbering system to introduce the omens not attested elsewhere in the Ḫattuša omen corpus: KI.1 ITU KI.1/KI.2 ITU KI.2 etc. This numbering system is sometimes found in Kassite compositions instead of KI.MIN (e. g. HS 1911/KAL 10.81, namburbû). However, it usually stands in for otherwise repeated text, which – if the Hittite translator was correct – should only be šumma. The rare form uštenmer in B also points to a Middle Babylonian original.

Exemplar A is a Sammeltafel with mainly omens concerning human behavior, which have a duplicate in KUB 29.10 and were edited by Güterbock H.G. 1957-1958a: 79-80. The colophon describes the tablet as DUB 1KAM UN-aš DEN.ZU-aš ‘first tablet of man and moon’ or ‘one tablet of man and moon’.

Exemplar B is also one of the few omen tablets with a (partially) surviving colophon: The scribe Pallā belonged to the scribes trained and/or supervised by the famous Anuwanza and later had a political career (Hout Th.P.J. van den 1995c: 216-225; Torri G. 2022a: 63).

The entries contain omens of lunar eclipses during the setting of the moon and in specific month without noting individual days. Exemplar B uses the in Ḫattuša otherwise unknown phrase KI 4 ITU KI 4 D30 to introduce the omens, the Akkadian verb for the eclipse is lost, however. From the Hittite kattanta pāuwaš mēḫuni it is clear that the text deals with eclipses during the setting of the moon. The phrase mūša uštenmer is apparently a Št-passive or reflexive of namāru. A Št of that root is so far not attested and thus it is possible that mūša uštenmer is a causative t-Perf and means ‘and it then illuminates the night’, perhaps meaning the sun, i. e. ‘it becomes morning’. The Hittite translation išpan laknuzzi however means ‘it spends the night’ (cf. CHD/L-N, 20a) and definitely understood the form to be intransitive.

Exemplar A uses the verb ak-, ‘to die’, to describe the eclipse, same as the monthly eclipse omens CTH 532.3 but different from the monthly eclipse omens in CTH 532.5. Interestingly, both exemplar A and B end after the fourth month and then have a colophon. It is thus possible that A was a translation of an Akkadian Sammeltafel (B?) or that the excerpt of lunar eclipses was used as teaching text. Since the scribe Pallā was apparently an apprentice (GAB.ZU.ZU) at the time of writing, we may surmise that these omen texts were in fact part of teaching a scribe Akkadian.

Although the introduction of paragraphs with KI 4 ITU KI 4 D30 is unusual, similar monthly eclipse sections are known from Old Babylonian Mari (ARM 26.248), the late Middle Assyrian fragment KAL 11.10, obv. I 1′-10′ from Aššur, and the first millennium hemerological series iqqur īpuš (Labat R. 1965c: 142-163), although non can be considered an actual parallel.