Odes to love are almost as old as language and love itself. For many years, the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) from the Old Testament of the Bible was widely considered to be the earliest poetic tribute to matters of the heart. But in 1951, Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer found an older ode on a cuneiform tablet from the excavation of the Mesopotamian city of Nineveh. It had been unearthed in the mid-nineteenth century but put in a drawer until Kramer rediscovered it. When he translated it, Kramer found the tablet contains the Love Song for Shu-Sin (c. 2,000 BCE), part of an annual rite known as the “sacred marriage.” Sounds pretty tame and ceremonial, right? Guess again—it’s actually pretty steamy stuff, offering lines like You have captivated me, let me stand tremblingly before you. Bridegroom, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber…Lion, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber. So, before Solomon’s lover likened his lady to “a mare among Pharaoh’s chariot horses”—and a couple of millennia before slow jams—the Neo-Assyrians were heating things up with a love song for the ages.
No Comments