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17. BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE 247
the reign of Sargon II (721-705 BC): this beautiful example of Assyrian craftsmanship is decorated with the
image of a four-winged, bare-headed genius throttling two ostrich birds and may have been an official Assyrian
gift to Urzana when relations between Assyria and Musasir were still blossoming. While the first and
original inscription only identifies the purpose of the seal as a talisman, 33 the secondary inscription, which was
engraved in six lines above and below the first one, seems to provide us with an etymology for the name
Musasir:
Seal of Urzana, the king of Musasir, the city of the raven, of which, like a snake in difficult mountains, the mouth
is open. 34
Fig. 17.02. Seal of Urzana (after Wartke 1993a: Abb. 16 ).
Leaving the reference to Musasir as a ‘raven city’ aside for the moment, we can certainly agree with
C.B.F. Walker that the second part of the inscription is a pun on the Assyrian name of the city, consisting of
muÒu ‘exit’ and Òiru ‘snake’ 35 and would therefore appear somewhat less obscure in an Assyrian-speaking
environment than our translation might initially suggest.
Therefore, we should perhaps not expect to find clues in the physical landscape that may be connected
with a snake’s mouth, yet on the other hand there can be little doubt that the city was indeed situated in ‘difficult
mountains’ – but where exactly? It seems evident from the itinerary of Sargon’s 714 campaign, 36 given
in his Letter to Assur, 37 that Musasir should be situated somewhere in the impressive mountain range which
needed to be crossed in order to reach Lake Urmia when coming from central Assyria. The assumption of a
33 NA4. dLAMMA = aban lamassi, literally ‘stone of the protective deity.’ The seal is fashioned out of pink chalcedony and NA4. dLAMMA might also refer to the material, but this is less likely; see Collon 1994: 37.
34 NA4.KISIB PNUr-za-na 2 LUGAL KUR.Mu-Òa-Òir 3 URU.Ú.NAGA ! .MUSEN ! 4 sa GIM MUS 5 ina KUR-e HUL.MES 6 KA-sú pe-tu-u.
The reading is unproblematic with the exception of the last two signs in l. 3. I follow the small emendation of Thureau-Dangin 1912: XII
rather than the proposal of Irving Finkel apud Collon 1994: 37-38 to read this line as URU.Ú-ra ! -as-ti and interpret this as ‘an Urartian city’,
this spelling for Urartu is not attested in the contemporary Assyrian texts but perhaps more importantly, Musasir was not an Urartian city.
35 C.B.F. Walker apud Collon 1987: 87.
36 For the many attempts to reconstruct the route of this campaign see Zimansky 1990 (with a map sketching the previous reconstructions
of the route on p. 6 fig. 1) and Zimansky 1995b and cf. Salvini 1995b: 46.
37 Text publication by Thureau-Dangin 1912 with an additional fragment published in KAH 2 141; last full edition by Mayer 1983.
The text is here quoted as Sg 8.