Wisdom from the Two Rivers

Today’s Mesopotamian maxim is less about advice and more about love.

The opening of the world's oldest love poem. It was pressed into a piece of clay in ancient Mesopotamia around 2030 BCE, roughly 1,000 years before Homer, 1,500 years before the Song of Solomon.

‘Bridegroom, dear to my heart,Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet,Lion, dear to my heart,Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet.’ (translated by Samuel Noah Kramer)

The poem was written around 2030 BCE by a woman, almost certainly a high priestess, to a king named Shu-Sin.

The occasion was the sacred marriage ritual performed each New Year to ensure the fertility of the earth. She wasn't writing in secret. She was writing for an audience of gods.

The tablet, a small piece of terracotta, just 10 centimetres tall, was excavated at Nippur in Iraq between 1889 and 1900, shipped to Istanbul, and placed in a museum drawer. It sat there, unread, for fifty years.

In 1951, an American scholar named Samuel Noah Kramer was working his way through 74,000 uncatalogued tablets at the Istanbul Museum of the Ancient Orient when he pulled out catalogue number 2461. He later wrote:

"What I held in my hand was one of the oldest love songs written down by the hand of man."

And it still reads like the first thought of someone falling in love.

(Image source: Wikipedia)