Disputation Literature in the Near East and Beyond

Enrique Jiménez, Catherine Mittermayer

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501510212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient Religion

Disputation literature is a type of text in which usually two non-human entities (such as trees, animals, drinks, or seasons) try to establish their superiority over each other by means of a series of speeches written in an elaborate, flowery register. As opposed to other dialogue literature, in disputation texts there is no serious matter at stake only the preeminence of one of the litigants over its rival. These light-hearted texts are known in virtually every culture that flourished in the Middle East from Antiquity to the present day, and they constitute one of the most enduring genres in world literature. The present volume collects over twenty contributions on disputation literature by a diverse group of world-renowned scholars. From ancient Sumer to modern-day Bahrain, from Egyptian to Neo-Aramaic, including Latin, French, Middle English, Armenian, Chinese and Japanese, the chapters of this book study the multiple avatars of this venerable text type.

1 Introduction

Enrique Jiménez

Catherine Mittermayer

Said tea to coffee: “Oh you burnt one, All blackened and crushed, your good looks gone, (…) How come you’re so proud and so haughty? Loquacity’s truly your forte! Yellow one, shall I list your disasters, One by one to your Bedouin masters? You dullard! Your real name is coffee, To all who imbibe, catastrophe! A fruit you are not, nor a savour, Nor relief for the tired from their labour. But me, I give all relaxation, I’m a balm, soothing wounds and vexation.” (Holes 1996: 312 ll. 16 – 20)

The passage above belongs to a poem written by a Bahraini named ʿAbdallāh Ḥusayn al-Qārī in 1955. The poem recounts how, on a Thursday evening – traditionally a time for relaxation and leisure – the poet is lying on his bed watching the coffee-pot and the tea-kettle bubbling away in front of him. Suddenly, the two come to life, greet him, and ask him to adjudicate a dispute between them. A bitter discussion follows, during which each of the contenders pleads its case in order to establish its own superiority over its rival. After a series of extravagant and colorful pleas, the poet rules that both beverages are to marry each other, thus reflecting the Gulf tradition of alternately drinking small cups of bitter coffee and sweet tea.

The poem is part of a locally published dīwān, which contains poems composed in Bahrain between the 1930’s and 1950’s. The poems deal, half in earnest half in jest, with contemporary, vibrant topics, such as ‘Pearl-Diving versus Oil Wells’. However, poems of the same type had been composed in roughly the same area for over four thousand years. The striking similarity between these 20^th century CE debates and their ancient Mesopotamian forerunners is clear from reading, for instance, a passage from the Sumerian debate between Bird and Fish, composed some four thousand years earlier, during the reign of King Šulgi of Ur (21^st century BCE). In that text, both contenders assert their precedence over the other litigant by means of no less colorful arguments and vocabulary:

Bird replied to Fish: (…)

“Your mouth is a mound of ruins, surrounded by teeth, you cannot look behind you!

Cripple, your limbs are clipped, your fins are to the right and left of your neck!

Your foul smell make people vomit and wrinkle their nose. (…)

But I am the beautiful, wise bird!

Fair artistry was put into (the finishing of) my inlays,

While no equal effort has been applied to your pale body.

Strutting around in the king’s palace, I am an adornment.”

(Mittermayer 2019: 71 ll. 56 – 71)

Certain features of debate literature remain stable from its earliest inception to its most recent avatars. First and foremost, debates normally present two litigants (such as trees, animals, drinks, seasons or human beings) and basically have a tripartite structure:

1. Introduction describing the contestants and the occasion of the disputation
2. Disputation proper
3. Judgement scene

The main part, the verbal disputation, is formally structured as a dialogue and contains highly sophisticated speeches. No transcendent question is at stake in these light-hearted texts: the litigants simply try to argue their superiority over their rivals. As stated in one of the Akkadian poems, two animals came to quarrel because “their hearts rejoiced in disputation.”

In scholarly literature, texts consisting mainly of dialogue are frequently divided between disputations/debates and dialogues. Such labels can be misleading, as they result in an artificial segregation of a coherent group of texts, as was the case of the Sumerian dialogues and disputations (Mittermayer 2019: 2 – 7). As Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann (2007: 265 – 66) shows, the dialogue form is a basic component of several text categories, among them instructive or philosophic dialogues as well as disputations. The present volume, therefore, includes papers on texts traditionally classified as “dialogues” and on texts labelled in the secondary literature as “disputations,” in an attempt to regroup traditions that have earlier been studied separately, but which should be considered together. The difference between “disputations” and “dialogues,” if there is any, should be considered in each of the cultures in which they appear: whereas in Egyptian literature there is a difference between disputations and “scientific” dialogues (see the paper by Andréas Stauder), in Syriac literature texts traditionally classified as belonging to both categories were transmitted side by side (Sebastian Brock).

Texts usually classified as “disputations” differ substantially in the many traditions in which they are attested. They can be independent compositions or part of larger literary works, and vary in length, style and purpose (e. g. humoristic vs instructive). These differences reflect the strong embeddedness of the disputations in their own literary tradition and justify the integration of seemingly different kind of texts in this volume. However, as stated in Jiménez 2017: 11 – 12), it is possible to postulate the existence of a set of universals, features that are common to the texts in most literary traditions in which they appear. These universals are:

1. Disputations are poetic texts, usually written in verse or in literary prose.
2. The structure of disputations is usually tripartite: introduction, disputation proper, and adjudication
3. The second section (“disputation proper”) normally contains only dialogue. Their dialectical character sets disputations apart from fables, which are usually narrative texts.
4. The litigants, generally two, tend to be entities that are otherwise non-articulate, such as trees, animals, and human types.
5. The only goal of the discussion is to establish the pre-eminence of one of the speakers. Since no serious matter is at hand, disputations tend to be humorous.

Texts fulfilling all or most of these universals represent a relatively rare category in world literature. However, they have a remarkably long history: we can trace a history of this text type that spans almost four thousand years, from the 21^st century BCE to the 21^st century CE. The oldest known disputations were written in the Sumerian language, the earliest recorded language in history. Most of them were composed at the end of the third millennium BCE, but their manuscripts date to the first part of the second millennium BCE. Three different categories of Sumerian debates can be established: precedence debates (see the contribution by Catherine Mittermayer), debates between students (Manuel Ceccarelli) and those between two women (Jana Matuszak). In all three categories, the debates are carefully constructed pieces of rhetoric, which make use of a plethora of devices to make their arguments convincing: it is often clear from the arguments who the winning and who the losing party would be.

The oldest manuscript of an Akkadian disputation dates to around the same time as the manuscripts of the Sumerian ones, viz. the first quarter of the second millennium BCE. Its prologue, clearly inspired by Sumerian models, tells how the first king of the city of Kish planted a tamarisk and a palm in his courtyard, thus provoking their unremitting enmity (Andrew R. George). Whereas the Sumerian disputations appear to have died out after the first quarter of the second millennium BCE, their Akkadian counterparts continued to be transmitted and adapted for almost two millennia. The latest manuscripts of Akkadian debates date to the second century BCE, but by then the genre was a literary fossil (Enrique Jiménez).

Perhaps influenced by Mesopotamian models, disputes of quarrelling pairs first appear in Egypt during the 14^th century BCE, with the Trial of Body and Head (Bernard Mathieu). Egyptian disputations are related, and probably derived from, the so-called “discourses,” dialogues or monologues with performative features that flourished during the Middle Kingdom (2000 – 1700 BCE), and whose Sitz im Leben was – as in the case of the Mesopotamian debates – the royal court (Andréas Stauder).

The Fable of Jotham (Judges 9: 7 – 21) is almost the sole witness to a Northwest Semitic tradition of disputation poems in Antiquity. Clearly an adaptation of a once independent composition, it opens a small window onto a now lost ancient tradition of disputations in Hebrew, and represents one of the earliest examples of the adaptation of a disputation for a new literary context (Andrés Piquer Otero).

A famous Parthian disputation was composed in late Antiquity: the “Assyrian Tree” (Draxt ī āsūrīg), which displays clear influences of the Babylonian tradition (Firuza Abdullaeva). The genre resurfaces in Syriac in the 4^th century CE in the works of Ephrem of Nisibis. Influenced by the Jewish Aramaic literary tradition, they often feature biblical characters as protagonists (Sebastian Brock). From the beginning of its written tradition, Armenian literature was in close contact with the Western and Southern neighboring cultures. Armenian debates are first attested in the 5^th century, in the form of translations of poems by Ephrem. Independent Armenian debates, however, are only attested from the beginning of the 17^th century CE onwards, coinciding with the rising popularity of itinerant bards (Sergio La Porta).

The first Arabic disputations (munāẓara and muḥāwara) appear around the 9^th century CE, and the genre survives in Arabic literature until the present day. Some of the topics, such as Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter, are attested since the time of al-Jāḥīẓ (9^th century CE) until the 20^th century CE (Geer Jan van Gelder). A relatively late comer to the Arabic tradition, Night and Day, is attested in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literature (David Larsen). Arabic disputations were highly influential, and were skillfully emulated by Hebrew poets in Spain, who adapted them to the Hebrew literary tradition and inserted frequent references to Biblical and Rabbinical literature (Amparo Alba). Turkish debates, first attested in the 11^th century CE, bloomed during the Ottoman period: Turkish poets showed a weakness for disputes between mind-altering substances, the first of which (‘Hashish and Wine’) was written by the famous poet Fuzûlî (Hatice Aynur). The Persian tradition of literary disputations, whose roots plunge deep into the Parthian period, flourished during the Iranian Renaissance and found its most famous cultivator in Asadī Ṭūsī, who added a socio-political and religious dimension to the Persian disputations. He is the first to write a debate poem on the contest between the Arabs and the Persians, a topic that will remain popular for hundreds of years (Asghar Seyed-Gohrab).

In Medieval Europe, the genre of the debate emerges during the Early Middle Ages. The oldest examples are written in Latin and date to the 8^th and 9^th century CE. They are heavily dependent on bucolic poetry, in particular on Vergil’s Eclogues (Vicente Cristóbal and Juan Luis Arcaz Pozo). In the following centuries, debate poetry flourishes in vernacular European languages. The debate of The Owl and the Nightingale was written in Middle English around 1200 CE, at a time when Latin and French were the literary languages (Thomas Honegger). The genre in England was influenced by the Occitan tensos, which have a similar structure and are attested throughout the Middle Ages. They also constitute the “point de passage” for the French débat, a genre that develops in the 15^th century and falls at the confluence between lyric poetry and the Latin conflictus (Laëtitia Tabard).

Two literatures whose traditions of disputations began in the early Middle Ages, Syriac and Arabic, still cultivated the millennia-sanctioned genre in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Disputation poems composed in an elevated vernacular Arabic are attested in the Gulf well into the 20^th century: they use the old form to discuss topics as current as “Pearl Diving vs Oil Wells.” The astounding survival of the genre in popular poetry can perhaps be linked with the no less astonishing existence of certain Akkadian loanwords in the local dialects (Clive Holes). Neo-Aramaic dialogue and dispute poems, in contrast, do not represent a living genre: the handful of known Neo-Aramaic dialogues are translations of Classical Syriac debates, only one of which, “The Cherub and the Thief,” is used in liturgy still today (Alessandro Mengozzi).

Chinese ludic disputations attest to the existence of a parallel tradition in the Far East, whose origin goes back to the rhetorical tradition of the Warring States period (453 – 221 BCE). Beginning in the Tang dynasty (618 – 907 CE), Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese literature started imitating and adapting the Chinese models (John Chaney).

A double paradox surrounds the transmission of disputations. First, there is a tension between the vertical, transcultural aspects of the transmission and their horizontal role in the individual literary traditions in which they are attested (Reinink and Vanstiphout 1991: 2, Jiménez 2017: 148 – 49). Indeed, although disputations represent a wandering literary type, they are remarkably well integrated in the different traditions in which they appear. Thus, while undoubtedly related to their Su...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• Section I: Disputations from the Ancient Near East
• Section II Eastern Disputations during the Middle Ages
• Section III Western Disputations during the Middle Ages
• Section IV Contemporary Disputation Texts
• Section V Other Traditions of Disputations
• Index of Contestants