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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You're Dead to Me · Epic of Gilgamesh: myths and heroes in ancient Mesopotamia · 13 Mar 2026
podcast
It has helped me understand the mythology of Khumbaba.
But the Gilgamesh who slayed Khumbaba and chopped down trees as tall as the sky was not the same broken man who clawed his way to Utanapishti, the oldest man in the world.
He was looking for the key to eternal life, but he found instead a lesson in how to live.
I think the crux of Utanapishti's message is this.
Instead of trying to live impossibly long lives, let us do more with the short time that we have.
For Gilgamesh, this means acting as a shepherd to the people in his care, and by extension, the places they rely on.
When he returns to Uruk and surveys the city, he sees people's homes, the date orchards, the clay pits, and the temple, which represent domestic life, agriculture, crafts, and religion.
This is worth fighting for, he realizes.
The survival of each successive generation confers immortality on the whole.
Our well-being is tied to the well-being of those around us, and to the places that sustain us, to the waters that give us life, to the trees that give us air, the land that Khumbaba gave his life to guard.
I think there is a timeless lesson in these 12 tablets and their unexpectedly flawed hero.
Selfish, cowardly, violent, vulnerable, relentless, and eventually enlightened.
What are the chances that this story has survived from its earliest oral tellings to a fragmentary translation over 4,000 years later?
And what are the chances that it might contain just the call to survival, community, and care that we need?
Thank you.
Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
Absolutely, yes. And as you said, there are so many different fields of science in ancient Mesopotamia that includes things like medicine, as well as astronomy, and then later mathematical astronomy. So it's a huge field, and I'm so excited to get to talk to you about some of it today.
Yes, absolutely. And I think that's kind of from a, if you think of it from a more general approach to knowledge, knowledge production, natural phenomena in general, that there really is a lot of overlap and a lot of common denominators in how they try to make sense of the world. And one of those common denominators is that they phrased a lot of their observations about the world as omens.
And that is across a lot of different disciplines, but in particular medicine and astronomy in the very early period. So instead of just having a text that says, The moon's cycle is 28 days, and this is the layout of the land.
They're phrased as observations about the moon, how visible it is, whether there's an eclipse, paired with a prediction of something to happen on Earth, and similar with medical symptoms as well, although those tend to be more related to the body.
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