This commentary is written on a small, landscape-oriented tablet, which is described as an u’iltu-tablet in its colophon. According to Gehlken, this tablet and another one (K.68 = CCP 3.1.u80) are extracts from a tablet of the commentary series Sîn ina tāmartīšu (SIT), and they discuss omens from Enūma Anu Enlil (EAE) 46. Nevertheless, the first two entries in the commentary under discussion seem to be drawn from EAE 45 (see the notes ad ll. 1 and 3). Like several other manuscripts of SIT – all of which were found at Nineveh – the present commentary was copied from a tablet from Babylon.
Only the first three entries are sufficiently well preserved for the relationship between explanandum and explanans to be clear. The first two explanations specify the time period, which the base text refers to vaguely as “an unusual time” and “an unexpected time,” as the summer months, Tammuz, Ab and Elul (months 4-6). The third entry provides a philological explanation, equating the phrase “morning, midday and evening” with the expression “day and night.”
The rubric is of the type mukallimtu 2a. It is unusual in that it begins with the word šūmāti, “lines,” and contains the spelling of mukallimtu as mu-kal-lim-da, a probably playful writing which is otherwise attested only in the astrological commentary K.886 (CCP 3.1.3.A).
The colophon indicates that the tablet was produced by one Aššur-mudammiq, son of Nabû-mušēṣi, of the Bēl-kundi-ilāʾī family, whose members are otherwise attested as living in Assur. Aššur-mudammiq’s father may be the same Nabû-mušēṣi who authored 17 astrological reports found at Nineveh, and which date from 669 to 663/2 BCE. The circumstances in which the present tablet was transferred to Nineveh are unclear.
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