THE ALUZINNU THE BABYLONIAN FOOL

We are often tempted to think that the ancients only made wars and atrocious vendettas, family feuds and other sad and serious things but it never occurred to us that even those peoples knew how to have fun and laugh.

This state of things is definitely the fault of historians, focused on political and military facts and on popular and human tragedies who didn’t have time to smile a little and therefore transmitted to posterity a message of sad, angry and rancorous peoples.

But our nature is to give a smile to history and then we could not fail to tell what was the ancestor of the comedian, the one who had the task of making people laugh.

At the time of the Assyrian-Babylonians there was what we would call “clown” or more commonly “comedian” and his name was Aluzinnu which meant, literally translated, the one who sits on a goat.

Undoubtedly this posture already determined an unmistakable sign of presence but to this was added, from time to time, a lively even scandalous costume, often they dressed up as women and cosseting, made a parody of noblewomen or wore make-up to mock nobles and kings.

These events took place in the light of the sun, in the streets and in the squares and all this was well accepted or at least tolerated because making people laugh was also therapeutic for the people who otherwise would have vented their misfortunes differently.

It certainly didn’t happen every day but only on certain religious holidays, where basically everything or almost everything is allowed.

The aluzinnu is therefore the ancestor of the comedian, the buffoon, the clowns and the best or most biting ones were hosted in the feasts of the nobles and in the cohorts to cheer and ease the tensions between the convivials.

Not infrequently someone perhaps exaggerated or had the misfortune of performing at the wrong time and then, at the end of the performance where he made everyone laugh, he ended up like someone who no longer laughed, with all due respect to tolerance … what can you do with every profession corresponds to a risk.