Irving Finkel

And that must be because when there was an enacting of an oral thing, a narrator would say, and it suddenly got frozen into the text.

So it's a very strange thing because if you're reading it, it's obvious that one person speaks and the other person speaks.

And they always have this complicated thing stuck in the text.

So it must be an echo of presumably you have your protagonists speaking.

enacting their timeless matter.

And the person who's writing it down says, and then Gilgamesh said, you know, like in a script.

I do.

I think the fireside narrative is

matter you know when we were kids it would be twerps with a guitar and sitting around a fire on holiday but that mechanism when people gather after dark when there is a fire and talk is the sort of environment where narrative accounts flourish naturally among human beings stories telling a story and doesn't have to be pragmatic it can be literary in in a way

Yeah, either a human person like Gilgamesh, or stories about the gods, and someone sees the Milky Way and they think it's a god riding a chariot up it, and then they have a story about, you know, and all those sorts of things, or whatever it would be.

But I think, probably, you have to allow for a strong creative principle surfacing in Homo sapiens at a quite early age,

Because the paintings on cave walls, you try drawing a running antelope in colour on a wall.

I mean, the quality of the workmanship, of the artistic ability, is unsurpassable.

It's not just good.

So how is that an explicable thing at this very early date?

It means...

that among all the population, you have Imbeciles and Einsteins, and somewhere along the line, you have Rembrandts.

And I imagine that half the cave paintings in Europe were done by one person.

I mean, you get the impression every family had a genius painter.

It's impossible.