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THE DISPUTE POEM: FROM SUMER TO SYRIAC

Ely Syriac literature was heir to three main cultural traditions: ancient Mesopotamian, Jewish (mediated in particular through the Bible), and Greek. Whereas the influence of the latter two traditions has been studied in considerable detail, the Mesopotamian heritage has only rarely been explored by scholars. Pride of place in this respect should go to Professor Widengren of Uppsala, who, in the course of his numerous writings, throws much incidental light on this phenomenon. 1 Another scholar who has turned his attention to this topic is Dr Robert Murray of London, in his book Symbols of Church and Kingdom: a Study in Early Syriac Tradition. There he draws attention, for example, to the presence in early Syriac writers of many divine epithets which go back to Akkadian and Sumerian. In a more recent article,2 entitled "Aramaic and Syriac dispute poems and their connections", he gives a wideranging survey of a popular literary genre which can be traced back through Akkadian to Sumerian literature. By way of Syriac and Middle Iranian literature, perhaps, this genre was to reach in due course both Arabic (the munazara) and Persian; then, in tum, from Arabic it may well have travelled, by way of Spain, to medieval western Europe, where it is generally known as the tenson.3 The Sumerian examples of the dispute poem have as their protagonists personifications such as Summer and Winter, Silver and Copper, Cattle and Grain, Pickaxe and Plough, or Tree and Reed, while in Akkadian there are disputes between the Tamarisk and the Palm, the Ox and the Horse, as well as a few others. The survival of a fragment of Ahiqar in Imperial Aramaic, from Elephantine (Upper Egypt), indicates that the genre was already by the fifth century BC known in Aramaic, for in lines 165-6 is to be found the beginning of a dispute between the Thorn-bush and the Pomgranate:4 The Thorn-bush sent to the Pomgranate and said: "The Thorn-bush to the Pomgranate: What is the use of your many thorns for him who would touch your fruit?" The Pomgranate replied to the Thorn-bush and said: "You are nothing but thorns for anyone who touches you" Surprisingly, this part of the Aramaic proverbs of Ahiqar does not have its counterpart in any of the later versions of the Ahiqar story in Syriac, Arabic, or Armenian. Nevertheless it is evident that the genre continued to enjoy popularity in the cultural area of the Fertile Crescent, for in the early centuries of the Christian era we find examples of it in Zoroastrian Middle Iranian, in