Sacred Trees and Enclosed Gardens j 127127 127
when the Sassanid dynasty was overthrown by the Arabs under the Umayyad caliph-
ate, and the Persian population was Islamicized. However, as we shall see in Chapter 10,
echoes of ancient vegetation goddesses can even be heard in the literatures of Christianity
and Islam.The Song of Songs and the “Garden Enclosed”
The functions of the Sumerian love poems of Inanna and Dumuzi were both sacred and
profane, combining the ritualized deification of the monarch with the practical function of
assuring the abundance of the harvest and the resulting prosperity to the kingdom. Hence
the love lyrics were suffused with agricultural metaphors related to a bountiful harvest.
Egyptian love songs dating to the second millennium bce, such as those in the Harris
Papyrus 500, resemble the earlier Sumerian poems in some respects, but the tone is less
triumphal, expressing tenderness and longing, as the following fragments illustrates:The vegetation of the marsh is bewildering.
The mouth of my sister is a lotus,
her breasts are mandragoras,^83
her arms are branches,
her —— are ——,
her head is a trap of “love- wood,”
and I—the goose!
The cord is my ...,
her hair is the bait
in the trap to ensnare me.^84If only my sister were mine every day,
like the greenery of a wreath! ...
The reeds are dried,
the safflower has blossomed,
the mrbb- flowers are (in) a cluster (?).
The lapis- lazuli plants and the mandragoras have come forth.
...
The blossoms from Hatti have ripened,
the bsbs- tree blossomed, ...
the willow tree greened.
She would be with me every day,
like the greenery of a wreath.
All the blossoms are flourishing in the meadow,
... entirely^85In the Egyptian love poems, the aristocratic young lovers address one another as brother
and sister (perhaps metaphorically, although consanguineous marriages were common
among Egyptian royalty), and the woman is often associated with greenery in the form of