Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid

speaker
840 appearances 4 recordings 2 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 12 Jun

Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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You're Dead to Me · Epic of Gilgamesh: myths and heroes in ancient Mesopotamia · 13 Mar 2026 podcast
It's originally about 3,000 or 3,100 lines long, but only about 2,400 or 2,500 remain compared to, for example, 15,000 in the Iliad.
It's written in cuneiform on 12 tablets.
And we have to remember that cuneiform was a script, not a language, used in ancient Mesopotamia, which is the region between and around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq, Syria, and parts of Turkey, which was home to a succession of civilizations like the Sumerians, the Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians who
Not obvious at all.
So cuneiform was a writing system like the letters we used to write English also get used to write like French and German with some variations.
And it was used in antiquity to write a bunch of languages that were all mostly unrelated to each other, including Hittite, which is an Indo-European language related to English.
But primarily Sumerian and Akkadian and the various dialects of Akkadian.
And the tablet, so cuneiform is impressed.
So it's kind of hard to actually write out with ink.
Very easy to impress with a reed stylus into clay.
So the story of Gilgamesh is recorded on these beautiful clay tablets in the cuneiform script.
Yeah, so we don't actually know how old this story itself is because it has these oral roots that we have hints of in the language and in other references.
So it was probably recited, for example, in the courts of kings, including the kings of Ur around 2100-2000 BCE, but it's probably older than that.
And then some of the earliest tablets written kind of records of versions of this story come from around that time period, the third millennium BCE or the 2000s BCE.
And then there's a standard version.
There's an old Babylonian version.
And then there's a kind of standard Babylonian version, which is the one that gets copied over and over and over and over again.
That comes from around probably 1100 BCE, written by a scholar named Sin Leki Unini.
Named in a later literary catalog, so we're not too sure to what degree we can call him the author.
Does he just establish the most popular version?
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