Babylonian Disputation Poems

The Babylonian Disputation Poems studies a group of ancient Babylonian poems featuring discussions between animals and trees. It contains editions of several new texts as well as an assessment of the genre and its impact on later traditions of literary disputations.

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In The Babylonian Disputation Poems Enrique Jimenez studies a group of ancient Babylonian poems that feature discussions between animals and trees. Using intertextual parallels and comparison with similar works in other literatures, he espouses a new classification of the Babylonian disputation poems as parodies. After examining neighboring traditions of literary disputation, he argues that the Babylonian poems influenced them, and that some may have been translated from Akkadian to Aramaic, from Aramaic and Syriac to Arabic. In addition, The Babylonian Disputation Poems provides editions of several previously unpublished Babylonian disputations, such as Palm and Vine and the Series of the Spider. It also offers the first edition of the latest known Babylonian fable, The Story of the Poor, Forlorn Wren.