This tablet is one of the few previously unpublished commentaries on the medical series of diagnostic and prognostic Sagig. It contains some 15 damaged lines belonging to the end of the tablet, followed by a ṣâtu 3b rubric. According to this rubric, the tablet would be a commentary in the 18th chapter of Sagig. Since the text of that chapter is only fragmentarily known, in most cases it is uncertain to which particular lines of the base text the individual commentarial entries refer. Only in the penultimate line is it clear that the logographic writing dul.dul-ma from the base text is rendered syllabically as it-ta-⸢nak-tam-ma⸣, “it is constantly covered.”

As in this last case, most of the lines seem to contain straightforward philological explanations. For instance r 6′ explains bāmat, “half,” by means of the more common synonym mišil. The commentary twice use the technical term libbū, “as in” (r 7′ and 11′): in the latter instance the word zûšu, “his excrement,” is equated by means of libbū with the rarer synonym šittašu.

It seems likely that the present tablet originally contained comments at least on Sagig 17 and 18. Only one other commentary on diagnostic omens from the “Sippar Collection” is known: CCP 4.1.4.B, which comments on Sagig 4, and which belongs to the same consignment as the present tablet (82-9-18).

The transliteration offered below has been kindly collated by I.L. Finkel, to whom several important improvements are due. E. Frahm and U. Gabbay have both offered valuable suggestions and corrections.