Longing and Lament: Exploring Love and Death in Ancient Near Eastern Literature

Catalog description

Love and death are two life events inextricably entwined, and poets from Classical antiquity through to the modern day often make love and death prominent themes in their works. This course offers students the chance to engage with how these themes were explored in the poetry of the ancient Near East, focusing on ancient Iraq with parallels from the wider Middle East. The course will introduce how these two key aspects of human experience—love and death—were conceptualized and presented in the world’s oldest literature, particularly following the love story, and then demise, of the divine couple Inanna and Dumuzi. Analyzing erotic poetry, love incantations, sex omens, stories about journeying to the Netherworld, ritual laments and more, the course will explore the conceptual connections between love and death through the study of Sumerian and Akkadian literature in translation. No prerequisites.