Six Sumerian and eight Akkadian disputations are known to date. These texts, from the Old Babylonian period (18th century bce) to the end of the cuneiform-writing era (2nd–1st centuries bce), some known from many dozens of manuscripts, are said by the author to display all, or almost all, of the following features: poetic compositions, often written in verse, with tripartite structure: occasional mythical introduction, the disputation between the two contenders, and the resolution, often declared by a god or a king. The disputation section contains only dialogue, with no narrative (the main distinction between the disputation and fable genres). The protagonists are non-human: animals, utensils, trees, metals and abstract concepts such as seasons. The purpose of a text in the disputation genre is to establish a winner; the verbal wrangling is not heuristic, is not intended to solve a specific problem, nor to offer an etiological explanation to some natural phenomenon (pp. 11–12).
The back-and-forth litigation is referred to by the Sumerian term ada-min and du14 and ṣāltu/tāḫāzu in Akkadian. It is unclear whether these terms are the emic designations used by ancient Mesopotamian scribes to refer to this genre as a whole, or simply to the disputation section only (pp. 10–11).
The book has six parts. Part I (pp. 69–153) offers an extensive introductory discussion of Mesopotamian (i.e. Sumerian and Akkadian) disputations, with a concise survey of all known compositions belonging to this genre, and a detailed analysis of its literary features (verse and style, language register, allusions and quotations in other texts, typical rebuttal formulae, speech introducing formulae and grievance formulae). The relation between disputations and parodies in Mesopotamian, Graeco-Roman and other literatures, as well as the perpetuation of Mesopotamian disputations in later, mainly Syriac and Arabic traditions, is also discussed. Especially important is the author's comprehensive investigation of the Sitz im Leben of Mesopotamian disputations. The fact that Babylonian disputations parody Babylonian epics and mimic in metrical style patterns found in “serious” wisdom dialogue, leads the author to conclude that “disputation poems appear as a particularly suitable genre for recitation or reenactment”. Indeed “… there is some scattered external evidence that suggests that Sumerian disputations were performed on some occasions … [but] no such data is available for the performance of Akkadian disputation poems”. Furthermore “some internal evidence … suggests that the disputation proper … occurred in a convivial setting. A banquet scene appears very often in Sumerian disputations …. These sorts of details about the disputation's setting are rarer in Akkadian debates, but they do appear” (pp. 109–10). Remarkably, three disputations are listed in the Neo-Assyrian Catalogue of Texts and Authors with the names of their authors – real or purported. This marks disputations out, for it is generally acknowledged that authorship of the majority of literary compositions in ancient Mesopotamia is largely unknown (pp. 111–5). Whether this authorship is relevant to the putative social setting of disputations requires further study, but their central position in ancient Mesopotamian schools is quite certain (pp. 113–7). Disputations appear to be bookish, scholarly genres. Their literariness is manifest in the fact that most manuscripts of Akkadian disputations come from libraries, namely from settings which contain literary compositions. In other words, the close relationship between disputations and other literary genres was not only intertextual but also physical. All this implies that disputations present a (rare) case of belles-lettres in ancient Mesopotamia. Authored, studied and copied in schools, catalogued by librarians and performed in elite (and less elite) surroundings, disputations occupied a pivotal position in the literary system of Babylonia and Assyria for many centuries. The interest in Akkadian disputations of the learned royal circles is apparent in Rm.618, a list of twenty-one literary compositions delivered to, or from, the library in Nineveh, several of which are unknown today. Curiously, disputations make up one-third of this list, amounting to seven titles in this genre (pp. 116–21). Part I ends with an erudite survey of disputations in later, non-Mesopotamian literary traditions (pp. 125–48): first and foremost, Aramaic, Syriac and Arabic (Classical and Modern), as well as in Hebrew (Biblical and Medieval) and Persian (Parthian and Modern) – all stemming from areas geographically adjacent to Mesopotamia. (The complex case of the Medieval Latin conflictus is different, see pp. 145–8 and 149–53.) Jiménez raises strong and convincing arguments in favour of the claim that in most cases disputations in these literary traditions build – directly or indirectly, via oral transmission or lost written channels – on ancient Mesopotamian disputations. The discussion of these later disputation traditions is summarized with the balanced assessment that “… although the genre [of disputations] itself appears with remarkably similar features in many different literatures, the particular form it adopts is entirely dependent on that literature's conventions and traditions” (p. 149).
The rest of the book is consecrated to editions of five Akkadian disputations: the Series of the Poplar (Part II), Palm and Vine (Part III), the Series of the Spider (Part IV), the Story of the Poor, Forlorn Wren (Part V), and the Series of the Fox (Part VI). Each of these texts is carefully edited and accompanied by philological commentary and a short linguistic and stylistic analysis. The book ends aptly with the Syriac edition of the dialogue between the vine and the cedar (by Aaron Butts, pp. 462–73). This impressive monograph concludes with a useful glossary of all the words contained in the edited texts and several comprehensive indices.
The Babylonian Disputation Poems is not only a landmark study of a specific genre in Mesopotamian literature, but successfully ties the Mesopotamian literary system in with other ancient, and less ancient, literary bodies.
