The oracle of Nusku[1] was a slave-girl from the outskirts of Harran who lived at the time of the late Neo-Assyrian Empire and was heavily involved in the Sasî movement, which aimed to depose the king Esarhaddon.[2][3] In 671 BC she claimed to receive a divine message from the god Nusku that the Assyrian official Sasi was to become king and that Esarhaddon and his family were to be destroyed.[4][5] The oracle placed herself under the protection of Sasi, became a leading figure of a conspiracy to seat him on the throne and continued to speak in support of him.[6] Sasi's rapid gain of supporters, including influential figures in the imperial administration, is probably attributable to the great personal charisma of the oracle.
The conspirators were defeated through some means in 670 BC and Sasi and the oracle were presumably captured and executed. Though they did not dethrone Esarhaddon, Esarhaddon's subsequent great massacre of officials and generals loyal to Sasi may have been a major contributing factor to the fall of the Assyrian Empire less than a century later.
^Jong, Matthijs J. De (2007). Isaiah Among The Ancient Near Eastern Prophets: A Comparative Study of the Earliest Stages of the Isaiah Tradition and the Neo-Assyrian Prophecies. BRILL. pp. 273–274. ISBN 978-90-04-16161-0.
^Claassens, L. Juliana; Fischer, Irmtraud (2021-05-21). Prophecy and Gender in the Hebrew Bible. SBL Press. ISBN 978-0-88414-474-8.
^Kvanvig, Helge S. (2017-01-01), "Who were the Advisers of the King? A Comparative Study of Royal Consultants in Mesopotamia and in Israel", Sibyls, Scriptures, and Scrolls, Brill, pp. 688–713, ISBN 978-90-04-32474-9, retrieved 2024-01-24
^Brinkman, J. A. (1977). Dietrich, Manfried (ed.). "Notes on Arameans and Chaldeans in Southern Babylonia in the Early Seventh Century B.C." Orientalia. 46 (2): 304–325. ISSN 0030-5367. JSTOR 43074768.
^Claassens, L. Juliana; Fischer, Irmtraud (2021-05-21). Prophecy and Gender in the Hebrew Bible. SBL Press. ISBN 978-0-88414-474-8.
^Stein, Diana; Costello, Sarah Kielt; Foster, Karen Polinger (2021-12-30). The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-000-46473-3.
The oracleofNusku was a slave-girl from the outskirts of Harran who lived at the time of the late Neo-Assyrian Empire and was heavily involved in the...
excavations in 2017–2018 in the southern part of the castle located remnants of a bathhouse. OracleofNusku, Assyrian prophetess (fl. 671–670 BC) Adad-guppi...
oraclesof Harran were seen as trustworthy. The prophecy, spoken by an ecstatic woman (the oracleofNusku), was the following: This is the word of the...
creator. May Nusku, the august vizier, hear my prayer and intercede for me. [ii.43b-46] The inscription written in the name of Aššurbanipal, king of Assyria...
his mother under guard to prevent her from becoming pregnant, because an oracle had told him that his grandson would overthrow him. She became pregnant...
is [. . .]. In the Amanus the cedar mountain his oracles [he consulted]. Before the great divides of the [silver(?)] mountains, its gate he captured and...
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prophecy by an oracle which promised the kingship of all Egypt to whoever poured a libation from a bronze vessel, after which the other kinglets of the Docecarchy...
recalling the welcome of Alexander the Great at the Oracleof Zeus-Ammon of the Siwa Oasis, Vespasian was proclaimed the son of the creator-deity Amun...
Susa [...]; I smashed its shining copper horns. [In]shushinak, god of the oracles, who resides in secret places, where no man sees his divine nature [along...
refer to the oracleof Apollo in Didyma near Miletus. It has also been suggested that Ptolemy (son of Seleucus) was actually the uncle of Seleucus. In...
Wilfred G. Lambert. Babylonian oracle questions. p 4. Wilfred G. Lambert, Enmeduranki and Related Material. Journal of Cuneiform Studies. Vol. 21, Special...
times by Mesilim, king (lugal) of Kish, who had drawn the borders between the two states in accordance with the oracleof Ishtaran, invoked as intercessor...
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