Curated texts / Love & Fertility
Love & Fertility
Rituals and recipes for restoring a man's desire (ŠÀ.ZI.GA, “rising of the heart”), and Babylonian love lyrics, several from the cult of Marduk and his consort Zarpanītu. These are fragmentary tablets known mainly from scholarly print editions, and the selection is small. The English is an unedited machine draft.
Machine drafts. Every English quotation here is unedited output of an ATF-to-English model, not a scholarly translation. Each card names its source; cards marked machine English only come from sources (eBL) whose transliterations we do not republish.
6 tablets
Šaziga potency incantation fragment (K.8790)
K.8790 · Nineveh · Neo-Assyrian“to his wife, his heart does not raise...”line 3'
Neo-Assyrian fragment from Nineveh in the ŠA.ZI.GA (male potency) series: plant recipes ‘if a man’s heart does not rise for his wife’, followed by an incantation.
Read the tablet →Šaziga ritual fragment (Sm 1514)
Sm.1514 · Nineveh · Neo-Assyrian“If a man... to his wife and....”line 1
Short Neo-Assyrian fragment from Nineveh of the ŠÀ.ZI.GA series for restoring a man's potency.
Read the tablet →Šaziga incantations (K 3350)
K.3350 · Nineveh · Neo-Babylonian“Wording for the heart of a man: to a woman.”line 7
Tablet from Nineveh with ŠÀ.ZI.GA incantations and rites.
Read the tablet →Zarpanītu goes down to the garden (K 5694)
K.5694 · Nineveh · Neo-Assyrian“Zarpanitu went down to the garden, approached the garden”line 4'
Neo-Assyrian love lyric from the cult of Marduk and his consort Zarpanītu.
Read the tablet →A lovers' dialogue (K 6606)
K.6606 · Nineveh · Neo-Assyrian“I went up to the quay and stood there.”line 11'
Neo-Assyrian love-lyric fragment from Nineveh.
Read the tablet →A long Babylonian love lyric (BM 45381+)
BM.45381 · find-spot unknown · Neo-Babylonian“From my childhood until my lord's presence I shall bring you? in a dream.”line 16
Neo-Babylonian love lyric (print edition: I. Finkel).
Read the tablet →