Love song of a woman on Schusuena from Ur III

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Ni 2461

The love song of a woman in Schusuena from Ur III is a Sumerian love poem , which probably dates from the end of the 3rd millennium BC. And is also known as Shu-Suen B in Anglo-Saxon literature . The poem is on a clay tablet with cuneiform narrated that after the site Nippur as Ni 2461 or after the repository on the Istanbul Archaeological Museum as Istanbul 2461 is referred to.

Samuel Noah Kramer , who first published the text in 1952, presented the poem as the “first love song” in a popular book about the first achievements of Sumerian culture, and it is also presented as such in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. The Guinness Book of Records described the text as "the oldest love poem in the world".

Find history and reception

The 10.7 cm × 6 cm × 3.1 cm plaque was one of several thousand that archaeologists found during excavations between 1889 and 1900 in Nippur , Mesopotamia . In 1951 it was published and translated by Samuel Noah Kramer during his student years in the Istanbul Museum.

In his 1956 book History Begins in Sumer , Kramer describes in retrospect how he tried to get an overview of the disordered and unclear holdings of the museum when he came across panel number 2461. His book bears the subtitle "39 first times in history" and so the poem found in chapter 25 in 1951 stands for the "first love song". Accordingly, the Guinness Book of Records named the text as the "oldest love poem in the world".

In 2006, the poem was made known to a wider public as part of a US company's Valentine's Day advertising campaign . In this context, the clay tablet was prominently presented in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.

content

The poem consists of 29 lines and is a love song in which the speaker expresses her longing and desire, which is addressed to Šu-Sin (also transcribed as Schusuena), who was born around 2000 BC. Was king of Ur . The last line (which is not part of the song) reads, "It's a balbale song by Inanna". Inanna was the Sumerian goddess of fertility. The meaning of Balbale is not clear, possibly Balbale denotes a Sumerian poem form. The state of preservation of the board is relatively good, but there are gaps at the beginnings and ends of the verses, whereby the gaps in the mailings can largely be supplemented by correspondences in other verses. The last two lines 28 and 29 show significant gaps and their content remains unclear.

The tablet was found together with two other tablets that contain two balbals of similar content ( Shu-Suen A and Shu-Suen C ). In History Begins in Sumer , Kramer also deals with Shu-Suen A , which probably surpasses Shu-Suen B in clarity , but has even more unclear passages. The two poems differ in the main lines of metaphor, which in Shu-Suen B is about honey and in Shu-Suen A is about beer.

So it says in Shu-Suen B , lines 9 to 14, in the translation by Kramer:

Bridegroom, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey,
In the bedchamber, honey filled,
Let us enjoy your goodly beauty,
Lion, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey.

If you compare the German translation of the same passage in Römer and Hecker, the differences in content make the uncertainties of the interpretation of such ancient oriental texts clear:

Man, I will prepare sweet things for you,
my dear , my dear, I will bring them to honey!
In the bed house where honey has been dripped,
we want to enjoy your charm, the sweet one,
darling, I want to prepare sweet things,
my dear, dear, I want to bring them to honey!

In contrast, in Shu-Suen A the Sumerian beer (which was prepared by women) has the role of honey in Shu-Suen B (a German translation is not available):

My god, of the winemaid, sweet is her drink,
Like her drink sweet is her vulva, sweet is her drink,
Like her lips sweet is her vulva, sweet is her drink,
Sweet is her mixed drink, her drink.

Love poems were by no means rare in Sumerian literature . In a title list on a Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet with 400 titles, 55 of the 275 still decipherable titles dealt with love and sexuality. And what was true of Sumerian literature was also true of the other literatures of the Ancient Near East .

interpretation

It is commonly believed that the poem refers to the holy wedding , a rite in which the king symbolically wed the goddess Inanna and sexually united with her, thus ensuring fertility and prosperity for the coming year. A priestess would impersonate Inanna and the king would play the role of Dumuzi , the god of shepherds. In his book History Begins in Sumer , Kramer describes the celebrations of the holy wedding in surprising detail. However, it is not certain that the poem can actually be read as a cultic text. The extensive lack of references to religious objects tends to suggest the opposite - apart from the last line in which the poem is referred to as Balbale Inannas . According to Thorkild Jacobsen , the final line of the otherwise “thoroughly secular” songs explains itself as a dedication to the queen, who can be seen here as the embodiment of Inanna. Römer and Hecker suspect the priestess Kubātum as the speaker, who appears in another poem as the wife of Šu-Sins.

The same applies to the collection of Hebrew love poetry known as the Song of Solomon . These poems are part of the Old Testament and, due to their direct representation of sexuality and desire, have always been problematic for Jewish and Christian theology alike, which is why the poems were interpreted to mean that it was not about sexuality, but metaphorically only talking about spiritual things . Shu-Suen B forms a parallel here, insofar as it is not clear whether it is a primarily religious text or, for example, a type of song that may have been performed at weddings or other celebrations. This parallel is the reason why Shu-Suen B is mentioned in several works on biblical archeology .

literature

  • Bendt Alster: Sumerian Love Songs. In: Revue d'assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale. Volume 79, 1985, pp. 135-138.
  • Samuel Noah Kramer : Five New Sumerian Literary Texts. In: Belleten. Volume 16, 1952, pp. 360-363.
  • Samuel Noah Kramer: History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History. 3. Edition. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1981, ISBN 0-8122-1276-2 , pp. 245-249.
  • Samuel Noah Kramer: The Sacred Marriage Rite: Aspects of Faith, Myth, and Ritual in Ancient Sumer. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1969, ISBN 0-253-35035-2 , pp. 92 f.
  • Willem H. Ph. Römer, Karl Hecker : Songs and prayers I (= texts from the environment of the Old Testament . Ed. By Otto Kaiser. Vol. II, Lfg. 5). Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 1989, ISBN 978-3-641-21768-6 , pp. 689-691.
  • Yitschak Sefati: Love Songs in Sumerian Literature: Critical Edition of the Dumuzi-Inanna Songs. Dissertation Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan 1985, pp. 400-406 (Hebrew). English edition: Bar-Ilan University Press, Ramat-Gan 1998, ISBN 965-226-203-X , pp. 353-359.
  • Yitschak Sefati: Sumerian Canonical Compositions. A. Divine Focus. 6. Love Poems: Dumuzi-Inanna Songs (1,169). In: William W. Hallo (Ed.): The Context of Scripture, I: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World. Brill, Leiden / New York / Cologne 1997, ISBN 90-04-13105-1 , pp. 541-542.
  • Thorkild Jacobsen : The Harps that Once…: Sumerian Poetry in Translation. Yale University Press, New Haven / London 1987, ISBN 0-300-03906-9 , pp. 88-89.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Willem H. Ph. Römer, Karl Hecker: Songs and prayers I. Gütersloh 1989, pp. 689-691.
  2. ^ A b c Tremper Longman III, Peter Enns: Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings: A Compendium of Contemporary Biblical Scholarship. InterVarsity Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8308-1783-2 , digitizedhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3DS.%20756~GB%3DkE2k36XAkv4C~IA%3D~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ%3DPA756~ double-sided%3D~LT%3D~PUR%3D .
  3. ^ A b c d e Clyde E. Fant, Mitchell Glenn Reddish: Lost Treasures of the Bible: Understanding the Bible through Archaeological Artifacts in World Museums. Eerdman, Grand Rapids, Mich. 2008, ISBN 978-0-8028-2881-1 , pp. 247-250.
  4. ↑ a b The Oldest Line in the World , article by Sebnem Arsu in The New York Times, February 14, 2006, accessed March 1, 2020.
  5. ↑ Oldest love poem - Guinness World Records.
  6. ↑ Read the oldest love poem in the world , article by Shane Croucher in the International Business Times of March 21, 2017, accessed March 7, 2020.
  7. ^ Samuel Noah Kramer: History Begins at Sumer. 3. Edition. Philadelphia 1981, pp. 246 f.
  8. ^ Translation by Samuel Noah Kramer in History Begins at Sumer. 3. Edition. Philadelphia 1981, p. 248. Kramer translates drink , that is, "drink". In the translation of the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature the passage in question reads “My…, the barmaid's beer is sweet. Like her beer her genitals are sweet, her beer is sweet. Like her mouth her genitals are sweet, her beer is sweet. Her diluted beer, her beer is sweet. “See A love song of Shu-Suen (Shu-Suen A): translation , accessed on March 8, 2020.
  9. ^ Thorkild Jacobsen: The Harps that Once ...: Sumerian Poetry in Translation. New Haven & London 1987, p. 87.
  10. ^ SRT 23 in Bendt Alster: Sumerian Love Songs. In: Revue d'assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale 79 (1985), p. 138. See also: Samuel Noah Kramer: The Sacred Marriage Rite. Bloomington 1969, pp. 93-95.