世界最古ラブポエム
World’s oldest love poem

Bridegroom, dear to my heart, Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet… . Bridegroom, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber.

That’s the sexy start to the oldest love poem in the world, on special display this month at the Istanbul Museum of the Ancient Orient in Turkey. Scholars discovered the poem over a hundred years ago, buried in the ancient sands of Iraq, but they’re hoping to draw new attention to it now.

The poem’s verses are in cuneiform, one of the first writing systems people developed after people developed writing around 3500 BC. Sometime around 2030 BC, a Sumerian scribe from the city of Ur pressed the poem into wet clay using a reed stylus, then baked the tablet, preserving the passion of the moment for 40 centuries.

The passion, scholars say, was ritual—part of a Mesopotamian festival of fertility and power called Sacred Marriage. Every new year (for the Sumerians, around the spring equinox), the Sumerian king “married” the Sumerian goddess of love and war, Inanna (Babylonian Ishtar), to renew the land’s fertility and affirm his own potency. In Summer, or several days, the king’s people got the Sumerian equivalent of Mardi Gras. At the festival’s peak, the king got Inanna’s high priestess, playing the part of Inanna. Woed by his offerings, the priestess would accept the king into her bed, with a poem addressed to him. This one, addressed to the Sumerian king Shu-Sin, is the oldest love poem we know:

Bridegroom, dear to my heart,
Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet,
Lion, dear to my heart,
Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet.
You have captivated me,
Let me stand tremblingly before you.
Bridegroom, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber,
You have captivated me,
Let me stand tremblingly before you.
Lion, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber.
Bridegroom, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey,
In the bedchamber, honey-filled,
Let me enjoy your goodly beauty,
Lion, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey.
Bridegroom, you have taken your pleasure of me,
Tell my mother, she will give you delicacies,
My father, he will give you gifts.
Your spirit, I know where to cheer your spirit,
Bridegroom, sleep in our house until dawn,
Your heart, I know where to gladden your heart,
Lion, sleep in our house until dawn.
You, because you love me,
Give me pray of your caresses,
My lord god, my lord protector,
My Shu-Sin, who gladdens Enlil’s heart,
Give my pray of your caresses.
Your place goodly as honey, pray lay your hand on it,
Bring your hand over like a gishban-garment,
Cup your hand over it like a gishban-sikin-garment.

…Michael Himick
www.artknowledgenews.com/?q=node/1412

In honor of National Poetry Month 2012

Writing in rope

Quipu (Khipu), Incan empire, approximately 1400-1532 CE
Museum of World Cultures, Göteborg, Sweden

I am fascinated with methods other than writing that people have retained ideas, text, and oral tradition.  One of the most fascinating is through the use of knots to record ideas and texts—a technique commonly used in the Inca empire and the South Pacific.  What is perhaps even more fascinating is that now, we are left with these intricately knotted ropes, and no one understands how they were meant to be read.  They just remain as mute artifacts, speaking in a language that no one can yet unravel. 

For more pictures of Quipu/Khipu from the Harvard Khipu Database, click here.
From about.com

Quipu (also spelled khipu or quipo) is the only known precolumbian writing system in South America—well, perhaps writing system isn’t quite the correct phrase. But quipus were clearly an information transmittal system. A quipu is essentially a group of wool and cotton strings tied together. The strings are dyed in many different colors, and they are joined together in many different manners and they have a wide variety and number of knots tied in them. Together the type of wool, the colors, the knots and the joins hold information that was once readable by several South American societies.

Quipus were a tool used by the Inca empire to communicate some kinds of information throughout the Inca Empire. When they arrived in 1532, the Spanish conquistadors viewed the quipu with great suspicion. Thousands of quipus were destroyed in the 16th century. […]

Quipus have not yet been deciphered, but some educated guesses about what they represent have been attempted. Certainly they were used for administrative tracking of tributes. They may have represented maps of the ceque system and/or they may have been mnemonic devices to help oral historians remember ancient legends.