ASA Dergisi

Öz

Abstract
The first examples of disputation poems come from the Sumerian Debate Poems (ADAMIN) written in the Sumerian language. It is understood that the ADAMİN examples, which use rhetorical techniques specific to Mesopotamia, were a part of the training of scribes. Starting from the Sumerian ADAMİN examples, the debate genre spread primarily to Eastern literature and partly to Western literature. It is understood that this genre was used to scribal education to teach the scribes the primary elements of society. In this respect, Sumerian Debate Poems differ from tales, fables and other narrative texts.It is understood from the available examples that debate poetry competitions were also held among priests in temples on special occasions such as festivals. This article proposes the Enki and Ninmah, which was considered by previous researchers as a ‘mythological explanation of the creation of man’, as an example of debate poem in terms of the competition between Enki and Ninmah and the similarity of the rhetorical technique used to other debate examples. The text also contains an etiological explanation for the existence of people who are ‘absurd and other’. In addition, people who are absurd and other in the sight of society appointed to important positions in the palace brings to mind a possible political corruption that took place in the palace at the time the text was written. In this respect, it resembles the satirical disputation that are seen in the later tradition of disputation poetry. Based on existing examples, this study focuses on the Enki and Ninmah together with the disputation genre that spread from Eastern Literature to the West and proposes this text, which previous researchers considered as ‘a mythological text about the creation of man’, as an example of a diatribe disputation poem.