Love Poetry

The most famous love poem from the Ancient Near East is the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible. Its joyfully erotic expressions of romantic and sexual love between humans are echoed in similar poems in Egyptian from the thirteenth to the eleventh centuries bce (Hermann 1959; Mathieu 1996). The Egyptian poems and Song of Songs focus on the physical and psychic sufferings and joys of unnamed young lovers. The poems are unconcerned with the social or religious aspects of love such as procreation or marriage. The Egyptian poems are called ‘‘sweet sayings,’’ ‘‘songs of delight,’’ and were meant to be sung (Lichtheim 1976: 181). The Song of Songs is attributed to King Solomon, who is said to have loved many women (1 Kings 11).

Mesopotamian love lyrics, however, differ significantly from the Syro-Palestinian and Egyptian, in that they extend human emotions and actions into the divine sphere. Thus, what is perhaps mostly secular entertainment in Egypt and Israel is more properly religious and might have also had a cultic setting in Mesopotamia (Goodnick Westenholz 1995: 2472-8). The most common kind of love poems in Mesopotamia is those depicting the courtship and the wedding of the divine pair Inanna/Ishtar, the goddess of love, with Dumuzi, her shepherd husband (Sefati 1998). The Inanna-Dumuzi compositions have been connected to the ‘‘sacred marriage’’ ritual, in which the roles of Dumuzi and Inanna were perhaps played by the king and a high priestess, who had, or pretended to have, sexual intercourse, symbolically renewing the fertility of the land. However, evidence for the actual practice of such a ritual proves elusive (Cooper 1993b; Rubio 2001).

While Song of Songs and the Sumerian and Akkadian love lyrics often take the form of dialogues and monologues, Egyptian love poems do not utilize dialogues since the speakers do not respond to each other’s words. They instead use monologues that juxtapose speeches of the lovers with only minimal reference to each other (Fox 1985: 259-65; Guglielmi 1996: 343). A remarkable feature of all the love lyrics is that love is portrayed as an egalitarian emotion, with the female speaker sometimes even more sexually aggressive than the male. In Song of Songs, the female actively seeks her lover and freely expresses her wishes for their reunion.

The Egyptian love poems seem less sexually explicit than the Israelite or Mesopotamian. The Mesopotamian poems directly speak of specific actions in love-making, and incorporate euphemisms like ‘‘wool’’ for pubic hair, and ‘‘apple tree’’ and ‘‘pillar of alabaster’’ for the phallus.

In the Ugaritic compositions of Kirta and The Betrothal of the Moon and Nikkal, there are sections that use jewel and agricultural imagery in their descriptions of a beloved. Also, two ritual texts may reflect sacred marriages (Pardee 2002: 90-3, 96-9). In Aramaic written in Demotic Egyptian script, there is a poem featuring a goddess as a divine lover (Steiner 1997). The monologue of a male lover begging for kisses is reminiscent of the Mesopotamian love poems.

In sum, these literatures offer a rich repertoire of genres and compositions, which open a window onto their ancient civilizations, as well as provide us with the intellectual and aesthetic pleasure we find in all literatures. In spite of the geographical and temporal distance, the literary fabric - from metaphors and alliteration, to the fear of death and the love of life - has remained the same throughout the centuries.