Thin End of the Wedge
Thin End of the Wedge
79. Rocío Da Riva and Nathan Wasserman: Carnival in Babylon
Rocío and Nathan take us to Babylon in the Late Babylonian period for a remarkable public ritual. The divine love lyrics are one of the most surprising literary survivals from antiquity. Sarpanitu discovers that Marduk has been sleeping with Ishtar. The two goddesses become embroiled in a very public shouting match, throwing insults at each other. What was this ritual and what did it mean?
3:56 introduction to the Divine Love Lyrics
5:42 one text, a series, or something else?
7:20 content in detail
10:45 reading the text
16:55 making sense of the texts
20:29 literary qualities
22:18 whose perspectives?
26:05 the lyrics in Babylonian theology
32:36 was it shocking?
34:29 who was it for?
37:56 what don't we know?
40:15 about the book
Music by Ruba Hillawi
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Hello and welcome to the Thin End of the wedge, the podcast where experts from around the world share new and interesting stories about life in the ancient Middle East. My name is Jon. Each episode, I talk to friends and colleagues and get them to explain their work in a way we can all understand. Cuneiform is full of surprises. New material is always coming along that just doesn’t quite fit with how you thought things worked. One of the most challenging parts of the whole corpus is a group of texts that have become known as the divine love lyrics. Imagine being in Babylon during the burning heat of summer. People are packing the streets. Marduk sits back with a big smile on his face, as his wife and his mistress fight over him. Bitter insults are hurled back and forth, alleging promiscuity and dubious personal hygiene. Was this divine love triangle high theology or the ancient equivalent of the Jerry Springer show? Who better to guide us through these remarkable texts than an expert in Babylonian ritual and an expert in ancient literature? So get yourself a cup of tea, make yourself comfortable, and let's meet today's guest. Hello and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.
Nathan Wasserman:Hello.
Rocio Da Riva:Hello.
Jon Taylor:Can you tell us please: who are you, and what do you do?
Rocio Da Riva:My name is Rocio Da Riva. I was born in Madrid and studied there, and in Ghent, Erlangen, and Wuerzburg. I obtained my PhD at the University of Wuerzburg in Germany. Gernot Wilhelm was my supervisor, and Michael Jursa from Vienna was my co-supervisor. I'm currently professor in the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Barcelona. I have worked on the cuneiform collections of museums in Europe, North America, and the Middle East. And I have studied and edited Babylonian cuneiform texts, including the corpus of the neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions. My main research interest is the first millennium BCE Babylonia. And I have published on Babylonian temples, their economy, and their festivals; on history, historiography, and on Akkadian literature. And I refer specifically to the Divine Love Lyrics. I have also been visiting professor at the Venice International University and at the Ecole de l'Histoire de la Sorbonne, as well as fellow at the Freie Universitaet of Berlin, among others.
Nathan Wasserman:I'm Nathan Wasserman from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My degree is from Jerusalem. I worked with the late Aaron Schaffer on Sumerian and Hayim Tadmor on Akkadian. And my postdoc was in Paris with Jean-Marie Durand. I worked on Mari texts for two years. I work mainly on the Old Babylonian period, different literary genres, hymns, epics, incantations. I worked on Akkadian love literature, and now we prepare--me and my colleague, Michael Streck from Leipzig--a new edition of the entire Atrahasis myth. And with Rocio, we spent a long time of work on this fantastic ritual, what's called the Divine Love Lyrics.
Jon Taylor:Okay, super. Thank you. Let's get stuck in. Could you introduce us please to the love lyrics? What basically, are they? What's it about?
Nathan Wasserman:The Divine Love Lyrics is a name of a group of texts, which was given by W.G. Lambert, who worked on this group of texts for many years from '57 and then in the '70s. He knew at the time about 11, 12 tablets. The problem was--and in fact, still is--that these tablets are not making a complete one text or one series. But before we continue with this problem, I will describe the Divine Love Lyrics, the DLL, as we call it. It's a ritual which took place in Babylon in the first days of Tammuz. So it's a summer ritual, which took place in the streets of Babylon. Temples are mentioned, but there is no question that most of the event was in the streets and on the banks of Babylon. And it involves three major participants: Marduk, the main god of Babylon; Zarpanitum, his very important wife; and Ishtar of Babylon, the fantastic, unstoppable Ishtar of Babylon, who becomes Marduk's lover, and they sleep together. It is clear from the text itself, and also from a commentary, Zarpanitum is getting very much envious, and she gets very much jealous of Ishtar. And there is a long and complex exchange of insults and provocations between the two gods. Marduk is rather passive, but the two goddesses, the two female goddesses, are quarreling, and we have many ritual instructions, and inserted with lyrics, so words which were spoken by the participants to each other, probably in front of the Babylonian public.
Jon Taylor:Thank you. So you mentioned already there that there's some issues with reconstructing the text. And is it a text or a series or a group? What actually is it? Is it standardised, or does it turn up differently in different times and places?
Nathan Wasserman:With a lot of work by other people--mainly Rocio and other people from the British Museum--where we were able to find about 40 texts--so almost four times more than Lambert had--the problem of understanding the sequence of the ritual and the lyrics remains. And as we understand the situation now, and I don't think we are wrong, that it was not standardised. So we do not have a continuous running text with ritual instructions or with lyrics, just as we have, for example, in Maqlu or in Shurpu or ... okay, even then we have some tablet variants. But basically you can say that tablet one goes before tablet two, and tablet four after tablet three, etc. We cannot say this, because apparently there is no fixed order. On the other hand, we have a lot of tablets. It's not a one-off text which one scribe sat in one afternoon and wrote it. No, it was very much copied, but not standardised. And it's a big
question:why? We have some answers, but maybe later. We have some suggestions, maybe not answers, why it wasn't standardised. And this brings a lot of complexity to the discussion, because first of all, how to make an edition of such a mess. And second, what's going on? Basically what is going on? Because sometimes you don't understand what comes first, and whether there was, in principle, a first.
Ellie Bennett:Maybe that content would help drive that forward. Could you give us a bit of an insight of what that content is in detail?
Rocio Da Riva:As Nathan said, it's a group of cuneiform tablets from first millennium BCE Assyria and Babylonia, with information about a religious ceremony revolving around the gods Ishtar, Marduk, and Zarpanitu. The ceremony took place in the city of Babylon. And this corpus, these texts, may be connected somehow to the Mesopotamian compositions dealing with divine love attested from the Old Akkanian period to the Hellenistic times. But our text offers something radically different, even unique, because more than love, their topic is amorous and sexual jealousy. In the text, we witness the extra-marital affair of Marduk with Ishtar, the alluring and sexy goddess. And the feelings of the betrayed Zarpanitu, so Marduk's official wife, are verbalised through salacious and very offensive language. We have descriptions of sexual activities in such a vivid way like no other ancient Near Eastern composition. And in our opinion, this text presents a new dimension of ancient Near Eastern religion difficult to reconciliate with what we know about Ancient Near Eastern cults since the beginning of assyriology, more than 150 years ago. We think that the cults described in these compositions were probably closer to popular religion, not attested in elitist cuneiform texts controlled by urban and temple groups. In the text, we find a rich array of protagonists and places. We have cultic personnel, artisans, local communities. The cultic attendants belong to the Esangil temple complex, which included Eturkalama, and their variety suggests a multi-faceted celebration involving offerings, music and dance with crowded streets, city gates, and river crossings. The city is the absolute protagonist of the ceremony, and although the fragmentary condition of the tablets prevents a full understanding of the ritual progression, as Nathan said, it's clear that the complex event didn't take place only in the inner spaces of sanctuaries, and wasn't restricted to a selected few. Rather, it was celebrated in the streets, like our carnival. It was a largely public celebration, popular; a fact that may have impacted the non-fixation of the corpus in our possession. We have in the text common people, and it seems that the celebration was particularly relevant for lower and non-hegemonic social groups such as prostitutes, servants, workers, and criminals. But the true protagonists are the gods, specifically the pantheon of Marduk. Marduk's cortege in Esangil, and closely related to the gods are the temples. A comparison with evidence from the ritual texts published by Linssen in 2004 and with the topographical texts published by George ... Andrew George ... in 1992, we could somehow locate some of the sacred places mentioned in the Divine Love Lyrics. But without doubt, it is a ceremony centered on the city of Babylon.
Jon Taylor:Would you be able to give us a taste of the text, please? Could you read a short passage?
Rocio Da Riva:Yes, yes. It has to be a juicy one of course.{LAUGHS} Translating this text has been very funny. {LAUGHS} Sometimes it's like, what? That can be that. {LAUGHS} They can't be saying that.
Nathan Wasserman:Yeah. Ah, the, uh, ritual. Okay, so we have ... it starts with riksu riksu, "By the command of Bel and Beltiya." This is kind of a blessing, "May it go well." It's written on the top of the tablet. It's a big... there ... the main ritual tablet, which we have. It starts"ceremony, ceremony of lamentation". And then there is immediately an incipit, "I heard she got laid instead of me." This is a difficult passage, but somebody's speaking about another woman who had sex and not her. "She wailed. And then Zarpanitu is sleeping in the cellar, whereas Bel is sleeping on the roof of Bel." This is not a good sign, if the husband and wife sleep separately. Then"Nanayitu, Nanayitu, you are my short, silvery, one." Broken, and then another incipit, "Until the pleasant breeze blows, whoever you are, whoever you are." And then they speak to Ishtar, probably, "You are my mother, Ishtar of Babylon, and the lady of life inside of Babylon." And there is a separation line, and it says, "This goes on as in the mouth of Dumuzi. Dumuzu the third day." Then we go, we skip a little bit, and I start on column two, line five, "A loud wailing sound in the cella from above. Ceremony, ceremony of Bel." Then there is a list of ritual instructions. I skip a little bit. "I shall go to the gate of An and Enlil. When I descend to the garden of your love, you ..." Broken. "When Zarpanitu got jealous, she went up to the ziggurat." So she's playing the drama queen, and she slams the door and goes up and down.
Again, ritual instructions:"The cup-bearers and the female courtiers to the vessel stand, which the kurgarru probably hold, and then Zarpanitu will bless the king." The question is, who is the king? We are not probably, as we understand, it's not the real, actual king of Babylon, but Marduk. "To the lady from the Equlu"--another, an important temple, which appears in the text. Then we go down, and this is a famous passage, "The lady passes through the gate of Beltiya and finds the something of the garden. Zarpanitu goes down to the garden. She keeps calling the gardener: gardener! Gardener! But her chief gardener does not answer. What is your plant? That of my friend, Zarpanitu, went down to the garden of something. And she says again: gardener! Gardener! You are the chief gardener of my city. Bring here the maksimtu wood"--a kind of precious imported wood. "Then the crutch that you open, it is you. Bring down and drop it until the pleasant breeze blows." And where does it take place? At the area of the park. And then it continues, "On account of sinful women, on account of the slave girls. Verily, the river's flow has purified you."
Rocio Da Riva:We can maybe read some Akkadian. I could read line 222, so atta ummi, you are the mother Ishtar of Babylon. {reads text in Akkadian} I don't have a very good pronunciation.{LAUGHS} It gives a nice flavour. It sounded lovely!
Nathan Wasserman:There is another, if you wish, a famous... very ... I don't know, maybe it's too, too vulgar, but if you wish, we can read it. Somebody is speaking. "I will make a dog enter into your vagina, which you trust, and bind the door to your vagina, which you trust as your precious stone. I have invited men in front of you, o vagina that you open. Why do you keep doing so? The entire district of Babylon is looking for their singu-cloth"--so a kind of intimate textile--"for the vagina that you open. Oh, two finger wide vagina, why do you always quarrel? Why are you constantly hostile? Stop!" And then it has a ritual instruction: "The Kurgarru will come out of the city gate and will kneel facing Hursangkalama. He will carry out a lamentation and perform an inhu-song. He will rise and sing, 'let me see the great Kish.'"
Rocio Da Riva:Yeah, the texts are absolutely wonderful. Really, they are so incredible. I mean, these texts are our baby, but really, I don't think there's something similar in the ancient world or in the ancient Near East. And we really hope we have done a fair and a good edition of the text, so that it stands up to the incredible quality and interest of the text. That's what we hope we have done.
Jon Taylor:They are absolutely extraordinary texts, aren't they?
Rocio Da Riva:Yes, they are.
Jon Taylor:Which makes me wonder: when did we first come across these kind of texts, and what did those first scholars make of them? Given how difficult they are to reconstruct and understand, how long has it taken you to make sense of them? And what's new?
Rocio Da Riva:Well, this project's roots trace back to 2016. I was working, and I'm still working, on temple rituals, and I discovered BM 40090, the most important ritual text of the Divine Love Lyrics among a group of Late Babylonian temple texts that I somehow inherited from Gianluca Galletti through Andrew George. So I began studying the texts and collating the known tablets from Lambert's 1975 publication, which was the publication we had until now. At the same time Christopher Walker gave me access to the catalogue of the Babylonian texts from the British Museum. That was unpublished at the time. It was later published as Leichty and others in 2019. In 2018, following a suggestion from Michael Streck, I contacted with Nathan and the idea to edit the texts together started to take shape. The Assyrian manuscripts of the Divine Love Lyrics had been known to assyriology since the end of the 19th century, but at the beginning, no one was able to identify them. The first scholar to do so would be, surprise surprise, Lambert, who managed to identify Marduk and Ishtar of Babylon as the protagonists of the text. And in spite of the fragmentary condition of the tablets, he did not fail to recognise the public dimension of the rituals, the setting in the city of Babylon, and the erotic character. He also realised that although the... in spite that the provenance of the four tablets that he published in his first edition in 1959 was Assyria, the composition was from ... from Babylonia. In 1975 he published a paper on the Divine Love Lyrics, including not only the four Assyrian tablets that were published in his 1959 article, but also ritual texts and some Babylonian manuscripts. So totaling 11 tablets in copies and editions. Since 1975, so it's 50 years ago, no new manuscripts of the Divine Love Lyrics have been published. But not a few fragments have been joined, mostly by Lambert and by Irving Finkel at the British Museum. Our present study contains 46 tablets. We have eight ritual tablets, all from Babylonia, and four commentaries, two from Assyria and two from Babylonia, probably from Sippar. We have 16 tablets with lyrics, recitations, no written instructions that come from Assyria, and 18 from Babylonia. All the Assyrian tablets but one are from Nineveh. The exception is from Ashur. And the 18 Babylonian tablets are from Sippar and others are from ... from Babylon. We have used a lot of information provided by Andrew George and Christopher Walker, and we have been able to identify some new badly-broken tablets. And Lambert's folios have been especially helpful for us, as well as the editions of many other folios in the eBL online platform.
Ellie Bennett:You mentioned that there are commentaries which suggest that this was the subject of scribal attention and scribal study. Are you able to tell us a bit more about literary qualities of the text? Is there anything that's particularly flowery, or do you feel like it's a bit more like street talk, as it were?
Nathan Wasserman:Yeah. Well, this is interesting. It's an interesting question and an interesting topic. The language of the DLL, of the Divine Love Lyrics, is very mixed. You have what you call street talk. So you have body fluids and body odours, and eschatology even, and a lot of, in fact, pornographic terms. But on the other hand, you have some passages which are truly, I would say, poetic or lyric in character. You cannot say that this is only one register of language, of Akkadian. It goes up and down. It's in a way, different than Old Babylonian love literature, which is mostly very elegic and lyrical, and very full of sweet feelings of longing. And you don't have this anger in which you find ... and the jealousy and vulgar brutality of expression which you find in parts of the DLL. You have some forerunners, you can say, for the DLL in an early literature, but in Sumerian, in these dialogues between two women that were published by Matuszak, you can find things which resemble what we find in the late ritual of Divine Love Lyrics. But you cannot say that the Divine Love Lyrics is the Akkadian version of these dialogues. No. But this tradition of two women standing and throwing insults at each other is known in Mesopotamian literature of the second millennium.
Ellie Bennett:So we were just talking about this tradition of women spitting and insulting at each other. Do we think that speaks to the perspectives of the people in the {UNCLEAR}. I think you mentioned that you were talking about how it's a public celebration by common people. Do you think their perspectives are reflected in these texts?
Rocio Da Riva:Yes, in the first place, I would say that the texts seem to reflect a popular layer of society, a popular celebration within an urban context. But I say this with caution, because we know that text production in the ancient Near East was in the hands of urban elites, of high social groups, the temple, the palace. So it's difficult to imagine that a strictly popular celebration found its way into the written textual tradition treasured by temple and palace. And yet the text clearly describes ceremonies in which many social groups appear mixed, in which people who do not seem to belong to the upper social classes appear frequently in, I would say, important roles. But one has to consider to what extent this is a reliable reconstruction of Mesopotamian social reality, or whether it is rather the image that the elites had of these popular festivals. In the second place, from a gender point of view, even if the texts were probably not offered by women--I would never say that--but they present a female point of view. Even if, within a patriarchal context, the feelings, the emotions and speeches in the text have always a female voice, the goddesses Zarpanitu, Ishtar, the women of the city of Babylon, and servants. In our opinion, both the content the lexicon and the symbolism of the composition serve to convey meaningful layers of interpretation that enable the authors to express political consultation in as much as they were breaking social and gender related taboos for these compositions enabled expressions of social subversion, even female social subversion, crude language and strong emotions, open sexuality, etc.
Nathan Wasserman:About emotions, I would add that one of the ... Rocio mentioned it already a couple of times, but this is an important point, and we paid a lot of attention to it in our book ... is that we have a new emotion here, which is even lexically speaking, jealousy, qanu: qof, nun, aleph, which we know from other Western Semitic languages. In Akkadian, it's attested mainly from the seventh century onwards. We don't think it is, um, just a matter of chance. We have one attestation in Old Assyrian, but this is a little bit different. We think that this is a new emotion, an emotion which was born out of other more ancient emotions, as anger. It is, in this ritual, clearly a female emotion. And at the same time, the seventh century, there's another text which is no less known, which is called the Bible. And in the Bible, we have a lot of jealousy, and, lo and behold, there also most of the subjects who are jealous ... most cases, is God. So this is a divine emotion in Mesopotamia, as we see it in the Divine Love Lyrics. It is mainly, in fact, exclusively female. In the Bible, in the Hebrew Bible, let's say, let's put the seventh century somewhere ... where there's a plausible date at least of some part of composition of ... it's a divine emotion, officially by a masculine subject. And we worked a lot about the evolution of the new emotional landscape of Mesopotamian religion as it comes through the DLL.
Jon Taylor:Well, can we follow that up, then? How does this text, or this group of texts, fit with what else we know about the top level Babylonian theology, and ritual and temple practice? And in particular, could you say something about the references to Ishtar as mother, because that seems quite unusual in terms of what else we know from this time and place.
Nathan Wasserman:First of all, yeah, we have Ishtar or mother. This is kind of devotional language. You are absolutely right. It's not common. Maybe Nannaya is more maternal, but Ishtar is not very maternal. Although, if we go to the Assyrian prophecies of Esarhaddon and to Ashurbanipal, you do feel this kind of tenderness from Ishtar to the king, but you are absolutely right. The text presents her, so Ishtar, on a really large scale, from the prostitute and very vulgar, so very, very low, up to a kind of mother, which is warm, and the speaker approaches her with a warm devotional language. Theologically speaking, we paid some attention to it, but it's very complicated. We step into this risky terrain of speculation. We have here a triangle. We have a triad of gods. Well, Parpola wrote about it. It was not all kind of triangles. So divine trinities, even, one could say. Not everybody accepted it. Although I personally do like and do follow this Parpolian hypothesis. We feel that it might be possible that deeply inside Ishtar and Zarpanitum are, in fact, one. And there is a sense, but again, it's totally speculative. You don't find it anywhere in the text that the two goddesses are two aspects of one female divinity. But this is a longer and different discussion. We wrote something with hesitation, but it's our understanding of our interpretation of the text, not necessarily others' interpretation of it.
Rocio Da Riva:Yes, I would add that was a very difficult point for us, the theological background of the composition. In the first place, because the texts are not very well preserved. We have really struggled through the palaeography, the language, there's so many hapax legomena that we have found. The texts are fragmentary. The tablets are fragmentary too. The passages in the different tablets have different orders, so it was very difficult to get to the theological, religious point. But it was something very surprising that Ishtar is treated as a mother, as a palm of carnelian, which I think is a very beautiful image. But at the same time, Zarpanitu is accusing her of having a very wide vagina, because she's engaged in constant copulation. How can you speak of Ishtar as a mother and at the same time treat her as a prostitute? It's something very, very special in these texts that puzzled us from the very beginning.
Jon Taylor:Do you think this is something that is specific to these particular deities, or is this supposed to be a reflection of what the expectations are for Babylonian women? You're a mother on the one hand, but you're sexually available on the other. There's a passage, isn't there, a slightly disturbing passage, which says something along the lines of a wife does not reject her husband at night?
Rocio Da Riva:Yeah, maybe that's this patriarchal way of women. You know, there are two kinds of women: the ones that are not allowed to get out of the house, the good ones, the honest ones, the ones you marry with, your daughter, your mother. And then there are the others, the public ones, the ones that go in the streets that... you know, the ones you sleep with, but never marry. These very sexist and patriarchal perspectives on women may be somehow hinted here, in this contrast, in these comparisons, yes.
Nathan Wasserman:I have this inclination, philological inclination, let's say. For example, Ishtar is a mother, but she doesn't have children. This is ... so it's a mother. It's a different kind of a mother. And nobody, you ummi Ishtar [you are my mother, Ishtar], but nobody says, "I'm your son". It is mother on the spiritual and emotional level. She's not breastfeeding. She's not taking her, her boy, to the kindergarten. She's not really working as a mother. She is a mother in the divine sense of being a mother. By the way, Zarpanitu, as far as we know, yeah, from the entire ritual, she remains Marduk's wife. They quarrel, quarrel, quarrel, quarrel. It's a little bit like slapstick comedy, but eventually everything remains the same. Marduk is the god of Babylon, the master, and Zarpanitum is his wife, and Ishtar is the lover. There's a lot of agitation there, but basically it's very static. The triangle remains very static. You don't have any victory. Nobody prevails over another person there.
Rocio Da Riva:Yes, it's true. On the other hand, there's what I also found very interesting, is who is Zarpanitu? Nobody knows anything about her. We don't even have an image of Zarpanitu, as far as we know, and she's this very gray character always, you know, in background, as Marduk's wife, but nothing more. Okay, Nabu's mother, which is not something quite, but she's always associated with men, her husband, her son. But in these texts, she has a voice and a very strong one. It's true that at the end, everything remains the same, but at least we find a new Zarpanitu. I mean, can you imagine Zarpanitu insulting Ishtar? I mean, Ishtar is the most powerful goddess in Mesopotamia, and Zarpanitu is just the consort of the god, and with the ... not much development of her cult, etc. But in this text, she's really the one who has the voice. So that's important. That's interesting to notice, too.
Nathan Wasserman:She reminds a little bit of Hera, Zeus's wife. There is something similar about her, this kind of personality, which is on one hand, very high on the pantheon. Or the other hand, a little bit side character, as if. And of course, the jealousy ... Hera is jealous, of course, of Zeus's amorous affairs. I don't drag it into direct comparison, but it helps to understand maybe the character of Zarpanitum in our text.
Ellie Bennett:It does feel very much like a soap opera looking from the sidelines. And you've read this amazing passage which is full of shocking language, and I was wondering if you think that the ancient audience would have been shocked by this soap opera or the vulgarity that you find in these texts?
Nathan Wasserman:In fact, we do think so. It goes both ways. On the one hand, they were shocked, and therefore this is one of the reasons we think they had difficulties giving it the fixed order, especially as the ritual took place in the streets. The hegemonic circles had little power over the development of the festival, of the carnival, as Rocio said. And on the other hand, they were very interested in the text, because we have so many copies, we have a lot of texts, and they were copying it happily. And I see them sitting in the shade copying and giggling, and kind of they were interested in this. This is obvious. If we think about it, it takes place in Babylon around Eturkalama. However, we have Assyrian copies. Why would they take these copies of a ritual taking place in Babylon, very Babylon, totally Babylonian, into Nineveh? Because they were interested in it, they found some interest in this juicy language, and as you call it, soap opera ritual.
Jon Taylor:Do you think then there's a transference similar to Enuma Elish, where you have Ashur taking Marduk's place? Would Ashur take Marduk's place here, and you have a similar kind of festival in Nineveh?
Nathan Wasserman:I did not ... we don't think about it, and we don't have any proof for that, but that's an idea. In fact, we do not think so. We think ... we suggested it in the book. The event in which the texts were taken to Nineveh were when Ashurbanipal made renovations to Eturkalama. That's when he found this ... the Assyrian scribes had first encounter with this text, and they took with them to Nineveh to copy them and to study them.
Jon Taylor:All right, could we just have one last question
about the ritual in this text:given its peculiar nature, what function did that ritual play in Babylonian society? Who was it for? Why would you air the complicated private life of the deities in such a public setting?
Rocio Da Riva:Well, this is very difficult to answer. We think that first, a celebration similar to the one described in the text may have existed in the city of Babylon in the second millennium. We know the Eturkalama temple existed there at the beginning of the second millennium, and at some point, for reasons we don't know, the festival began to be written down. Perhaps the celebration had grown in size and complexity and they needed somehow to preserve the memory. Or maybe because it was no longer celebrated and was being forgotten or in danger of being forgotten. We don't really know. We believe that the festival was still celebrated in one way or another at the very end of the first millennium, during the Parthian period. We have to consider that these texts are not prescriptive rituals. They don't provide ritual instructions of how to proceed in the celebration, not always, not only. But rather, they describe the festival in great detail, including what was proclaimed or sung during the course of the celebration, the so-called recitations, the lyrics that had to be uttered, sung or said, both in the temples and in the streets. At some point, we don't really know when, texts started to be written down about this festival. We don't know when, but the presence of certain elements in the text--for example, the repeated mention of Marduk as king--makes us think that the texts must have been written at the very end of the second millennium, at the time Enuma Elish was composed, and we think that the texts were drafted in the south in Babylon. But of course, the subject was of interest elsewhere. Actually the oldest texts we have come from Nineveh, from the Library of Ashurbanipal, but they are tablets that we believe come from the neo-Babylonian libraries of Sippar and from Babylon too. The texts were of great interest, but as we said, the strong and erotic contents perhaps place them somewhat outside the official scholastic curriculum. Were they, shall we say, kind of forbidden texts, because they were very erotic, very sexual, and perhaps for this reason, they were never canonised. They don't have the fixed order that we find, for example, in Maqlu compositions. We find that different manuscripts of the text have substantial differences. So in the edition, we couldn't prepare a score, as we usually do when we have different texts from the same composition, because this is a chaos. Each fragment has the passages in a different order, in a different place, with variations, etc. So after almost 10 years studying these texts, I can say that we have, at present, more questions than we had at the beginning. But that is what gives the Divine Love Lyrics their unique and fascinating character. There are no other compositions like this in ancient Mesopotamia.
Ellie Bennett:You've really been able to eke out a huge amount of information, though, even though you still do have questions. What would you say is your biggest burning question? What would you love to know about the text that you simply don't right now?
Nathan Wasserman:That's a good question. Philologically, I would like to have an order. Philologically speaking, I don't like chaos. Chaos is not a bad term, yeah, it's a big mess. And I think that more texts may shed more light of the sequence of the ritual and on the historical level, I would like to know about the real activity in Babylon. Babylon in that period is fascinating. We have late manuscripts. So there were Greeks and there were Persian, and there were Akkadian, there were people speaking Aramaic, and all this wonderful salate composee, this kind of big pile of ethnicities and religions and languages, and this festival taking place in the beginning of Tammuz. It's not nocturnal. This is an important point. This is the festival took place daytime, unlike other rituals, which we know took place at night. So it's a lot of activity, people. The days are long. You have a lot of ... in the evening, the sun goes down, still there is light, and people are in the streets and looking at Ishtar and Zarpanitu quarreling, insulting each other. It should be wonderful to see it.
Rocio Da Riva:Yes, yes. I would have loved to be there and to see, you know, this, this procession of the goddesses insulting each other, talking about their genitalia {LAUGHS}... of that. And with Marduk, you know, he's in the background. He's just, I mean, as if nothing, it had nothing to do with him, because he's a very passive figure in the text. He's the one who creates all the chaos. But he's, you know, he's the king. And as usual in this kind of ... of business, the man, you know, escapes without any kind of punishment. And that's what happens with Marduk, as you know. {LAUGHS} He keeps the wife and he keeps the lover, both of them.
Jon Taylor:Yes, a timeless classic.
Rocio Da Riva:Yes.
Jon Taylor:Okay, so you've been working for 10 years on this. You have a lot of new material you've edited, a lot of context to discuss, and you've written a book about it. Could you tell us something about that book, please? You know, when can we expect it?
Rocio Da Riva:When? Well, we hope by October. October, November. It will be published in Brill--Cuneiform Monographs number 57. We wanted to publish the text in a book, because we thought that we need a new edition. The edition that everybody's quoting, citing, and using is Lambert's edition, 1975, but there's no comprehensive edition or in-depth study of the body of text, especially with all the new texts we found. So we thought it was time to address this gap. We have tried to elucidate this structure and content and main themes of the composition, and we have tried to provide a detailed edition and translation of each tablet. Our aim is to establish a philological foundation that would facilitate a deeper understanding of this corpus. So there, our colleagues will start studying them using the edition. The corpus is very challenging. The edition would, of course, have many problems and issues. We do not claim to offer the final word on the subject. Rather, we hope that this will pave the way for further scholarly exploration of this incredible, fascinating group of texts. That's our aim, and we hope we'll be successful on that.
Jon Taylor:Yeah, thank you very much, looking forward to that, and thank you very much for explaining this all to us today.
Nathan Wasserman:Thank you.
Rocio Da Riva:Thank you for having us.
Nathan Wasserman:Yes, it was a pleasure.
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