Female Voices in Akkadian Love Poetry
The most-discussed female character in ancient love lyrics is without doubt the woman in The Song of Songs, whose independent voice and sexual subjectivity has been analyzed in many studies over the last decades. Much less attention has been paid to female voices in love poems written in the Akkadian language, probably because these texts are rather poorly known and many of them have been edited only in recent times. Multiple female voices, both divine and human, can be found in the nineteen Akkadian texts deriving from three millennia BCE. This paper investigates the amatory, erotic, socio-religious, and theological agency of the female characters in these poems, comparing them also with the female voice in The Song of Songs.
Martti Nissinen is Professor of Old Testament Studies at the University of Helsinki, and the Director of the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence “Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions.” His expertise is the prophetic phenomenon in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, and his research interests include also matters of gender (love poetry, homoeroticism, masculinity) in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. His books include Ancient Prophecy: Near Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2017), Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East (Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective (Augsburg Fortress, 1998), References to Prophecy in Neo-Assyrian Sources (State Archives of Assyria Studies, 7; Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 1998), and Prophetie, Redaktion und Fortschreibung im Hoseabuch (Neukirchener, 1991).