Palm and Vine is an Akkadian disputation poem. It contains a disputation poem between two litigants, Palm (designated by the rare name arḫānû) and Vine (Akkadian karānu), each of which praises its own merits and many uses, and discredits those of its rival. The text may have been composed in the second-millennium BCE, but only first-millennium manuscripts of it are known (see Manuscripts of the Text). Fifty-four lines from the middle section of the text are preserved, which begin in medias res with a long speech of Palm, immediately followed by Vine's rejoinder.[1] Three library manuscripts of the poem are known, as well as an excerpt on a peculiar school tablet.[2]
The Palm and Vine is a testament to the continuity between Akkadian disputation literature and earlier Sumerian disputation poems. The Palm and Vine, for example, contains remarkable phraseological similarities with the Debate between the hoe and the plough, even though the latter is attested from manuscripts which predate it by two millennia.[3] It is also one of several examples of disputation poems between two plants, others among it being the Sumerian Debate between tree and reed and the other Akkadian poems Tamarisk and Palm and Series of the Poplar.[4]
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