18 Love, Lust, and Poetry

The joy and pain of love is a dominant theme in Near Eastern literatures. Poetry and myth were the forms in which this theme was expressed. This lecture opens with a presentation of Egyptian love poems from the I4lh century B. C. These timeless poems, originally set to musical accompaniment, still speak to readers today. Often sexually explicit, they describe emotion and fantasy in a compressed, direct style. While Egyptian poems spoke directly of human love, Mesopotamian poems often focused on the amatory adventures and misadventures of the gods. These tales of the gods were often used as channs by lovers seeking good fortune in matters of the heart. We will look at some examples of this love charm genre.