The Dialogue of Pessimism

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The Dialogue of Pessimism (Akkadian: dullu) is the most mordantly comic text in the ancient Near Eastern corpus and one of the earliest sustained works of philosophical nihilism. It survives on tablets from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh (seventh century BCE) and from other Babylonian sites, though the composition is generally dated to the Neo-Babylonian or early Neo-Assyrian period, approximately 1000–700 BCE. The structural principle is rigorously consistent: a master announces an intention; the slave enthusiastically endorses it with three lines of praise; the master reverses course; the slave just as enthusiastically endorses the reversal with three lines condemning the first intention. This is repeated across ten or eleven exchanges — love, sacrifice, education, civic virtue, building, commerce, eating, civic service, rebellion — before the master asks the central question: "What, then, is good?" The slave's answer — mutual suicide, followed by the observation that no one has ever ascended to heaven or dominated the earth — is the text's punchline and its philosophical conclusion. It is both absurdist comedy and genuine nihilism: if every possible course of action and its opposite are equally justifiable, and if death is the universal leveller of rulers and slaves, builders and idlers, then nothing has intrinsic value. The final exchange, in which the master threatens to kill the slave and the slave replies that the master won't last three days without him, brings the premise to a complete circle: even the master-slave relationship on which the whole dialogue depends is meaningless. The text bears strong structural and thematic parallels with the biblical Qohelet (Ecclesiastes): "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" expresses the same philosophical position, and the repeated examination and dismissal of human activities (wisdom, pleasure, labour, wealth) follows a similar method. Several scholars have argued for a direct literary relationship; others point to a shared ancient Near Eastern wisdom tradition that includes both texts. The Dialogue's proximity to Greek sceptical philosophy and Stoic indifference has also been noted. The translation presented here draws on W.G. Lambert's critical edition in Babylonian Wisdom Literature (1960) and E.A. Speiser's translation in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (1955), both public domain works.

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