Istanbul 2461


Istanbul #2461 is an ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablet which is believed to contain the oldest love poem ever found. It is on display at the Istanbul Museum of the Ancient Orient.

Discovery

The tablet was unearthed at Nippur, in lower Mesopotamia. It was one of several thousand Sumerian tablets found by archeologists during excavations between 1889 and 1900.
The tablet was identified among 74000 others and translated by Samuel Noah Kramer in 1951, during his years of studies in the Istanbul Museum. Kramer was deciding what works to translate next when he found the tablet in the museum drawer. He describes the moment in his book History Begins at Sumer:

Contents

The table contains a balbale which is known by the titles "Bridegroom, Spend the Night in Our House Till Dawn" or "A Love Song of Shu-Suen ". Composed of 29 lines, this poem is a monologue directed to king Shu-Sin. In erotic language, the female speaker in the poem expresses her ardent desires and longings for Shu-Sin, drawing heavily on imagery related to honey and sweetness.
The following is the start of the poem :
The last three lines of the poem seem to contain an invitation to a sexual encounter, but in language not adequately clear to us.
The text is one of the oldest known lyric poems.

Interpretations

It is believed that the poem is a script for the yearly "sacred marriage", a rite in which the king would symbolically marry the goddess Inanna, mate with her, and ensure fertility and prosperity for the coming year. A priestess would probably represent Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of fertility, and the king Shu-Sin would represent Dumuzi, the god of shepherds, on the eve of their union.
Variants of the poem may have been sung during ritual ceremonies commemorating the divine marriage between the two gods all over the ancient Near East, particularly in Egypt. The translation of this tablet shed light on the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament, because some phrases are similar to the poems sung during such fertility feasts, as well as Sumerian weddings.

Literature