Irving Finkel

Dogmatic, and it's led to everything.

Inquisitions and all this kind of stuff.

It's all as a result of it, that one religion is superior and the other should be stamped out and all that.

In my opinion, monotheistic religion has generated the most fantastic amount of non-religious feeling.

Whereas when you have all the different gods and have different specialities and the ones you like and the ones everybody likes and they have their temples and their offerings.

It was very interesting to me to go into a temple in Calcutta when I went there with my wife Joanna.

We went into Calcutta.

the temples and saw how they were.

And I think they must be very much like the ones in Mesopotamia.

So there was never anything about them which affronted people's individuality.

I mean, there's no religious prejudice or even racial prejudice in antiquity.

All these things are modern, disadvantageous matters.

If you think what's done in the name of religion, it is absolutely staggering.

Yeah.

Well, we know it best from this Assyrian library set of tablets.

There are 12 of them.

It's a 12-tablet work.

That's quite long.

And Gilgamesh is the hero of it.

But the literature, we know it from earlier texts, and we know that Gilgamesh lived.