Oct 21: History & Archaeology ANE Workshop: Enrique Jimenez (Yale)

Date: 

Wednesday, October 21, 2015, 5:15pm to 6:45pm

Location: 

Harvard Semitic Museum 201

A lecture by: Enrique Jimenez, Postdoctoral Associate, NELC, Yale University

THE SERIES OF THE POPLAR AND THE WORLD BEHIND IT 

Wednesday October 21st at 5:15 pm
Semitic Museum, Room 201 ~~ 6 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 

Only two small and nondescript fragments of the Babylonian “Series of the Poplar” were known when it was first edited almost sixty years ago, in W. G. Lambert’s Babylonian Wisdom Literature. Since then, several important new exemplars have been identified, which allow a reconstruction of some one hundred and twenty lines of this poem. The newly recovered and still unpublished portions of text will be presented during the lecture for the first time. It can now be shown that the poem is a mock epic of sorts, which presents fundamentally un-epic characters (i.e., trees) making use of the diction and meter of the traditional Mesopotamian epic poems. In addition to a testimony to the ambiguous reception of traditional Mesopotamian epic, the “Series of the Poplar” offers an unexpected window into Mesopotamian material culture. The poem features four contestants: a poplar, an ash, a palm, and a vine. Each of these trees tries to establish its superiority over its rivals by celebrating its own qualities and mocking those of its enemies. The arguments the trees adduce in support of their preeminence are based on the benefits they offer to mankind: thus Poplar states “with my boats the sailor crosses the rolling sea swiftly!,” whereas Palm boasts, “humanity exults with my luscious fruit!” These references are sometimes oblique, and their understanding depends on the knowledge of Mesopotamian material culture, as it is preserved both in the daily documents and the archaeological remains.