sion or accidents of preservation.^201 In three of these cases the variation between sources
affects the month name in which a given phenomena is said to have occurred (V36, V38
and V39). These are most likely variants that emerged at a stage of textual development
in which the month and day information were recorded as lists of figures, and thus these
variants should be identified with the misreading of cuneiform numerals discussed
above.^202 The only possible exception is the confusion between the signs BÁR and ÁŠ,
concerning which see note above.
Seven instances of hermeneutic variation do not reflect a change in number. In V23 the
apodosis in A, D and J reads: “LUGAL ana LUGAL LÚ.NE KIN-ár,” šarru ana šarri
ṣalta išapparar. The corresponding apodosis in C reads: “LUGAL ana LUGAL
SILIM.MA KIN-ár,” šarru ana šarri šulma išapparar. The variation between the signs
⇽ ≈ in A, D and J, compared with ∠ in C hardly suggest misreading by the
copyist. The opposing semantic ranges of the words ṣalta and šulma might suggest that
this variation is intentional and not the result of scribal error. Perhaps the apodosis was
altered in C to reflect some historical situation, the truth of which the copyist was directly
aware. Otherwise this variant could reflect the presence of two traditions of interpreting
the astral phenomenon in question. A third possibility is to suppose a copyist’s error
through homoioteleuton, given that the variant apodosis that appears in C is found in a
later omen in other sources. However this last is unlikely given the placement of the text
in the two formats discussed above.^203
(^201) See the comments in note above.
(^202) See note above.
(^203) Tablet A preserves the apodosis šarru ana šarri salīma išappar ruṭibtu iššir libbi māti iṭab in omen 59,
which appears at the very end of section IV. In the text-type that C represents, this omen would have ap-
peared on a different tablet to the one where the supposed haplography is thought to have occurred. Alter-
natively, if C was copied from a source that included sections I-IV on the same tablet, then omen 59 would
have appeared on the reverse side of the tablet at the lower edge, while omen 11 would have been on the
obverse towards the middle of the tablet. The placement of the two apodoses that would need to have been
confused in C, if this explanation is true, would have required an impossible situation from the copyist,
who, midway through copying omen 11 on his tablet, would had to have turned over his source tablet, or