Dr. Dylan Johnson

And what's interesting is that we mistranslated it for almost 2000 years until we rediscovered cuneiform writing and the Sumerian language behind it.

this word aid, we'd always translate it as mist.

So we kind of thought of it as just, well, I live in Cardiff, so mist is a common reality of my existence.

That moisture just settled on the ground.

But actually, when you read the word more widely, it really does come from the Sumerian word id,

which is, on the one hand, just the word for river, but it has mythological connotations.

It's also the word used to describe what's known as the river ordeal.

So when you would submit litigants in the absence of witness testimony, you would submit them to the id, to the river, to the river ordeal.

And the idea there is that the divine cleansing waters, the divine river itself would be able to figure out who's guilty, who's innocent.

And so it stuck around in later languages like Akkadian and maybe made its way into either Aramaic or directly into Hebrew, we don't know.

But it's very uncommon to find these Sumerian words, which is why we think when we see that and so many connections to Mesopotamian creation stories, we really think there's a Mesopotamian link, maybe not directly to a text, but to Mesopotamian ideas or shared ideas that are common across this area.

Yeah, possibly.

It's not always clear because we have Western traditions that there is an idea that the path to the underworld is an underground river.

Like the River Styx.

Yeah, kind of like the River Styx.

But in the Gilgamesh story, there's no river.

There is an underground ocean called the Waters of Death.

But it's not a river.

It's quite clearly a sea.

And in fact, the path, it's a dry land path the sun has to take.