Literature and history

history dot come.

Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 4, Divine Judgment.

The first three episodes of this podcast were all about Mesopotamia. We talked about cuneiform and how

when Persia invaded Babylon in 539 b.C. the age of the clay tablet ended and a new one of phonetic alphabets and more perishable

writing materials began.

We explored the Enuma Elish and Atra Haasis, Mesopotamia's most prominent creation stories.

And finally, we heard of the doings of Gilgamesh and in Kido in the story many Mesopotamians

called He Who Saw the Deep and that we call the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Other than mentioning that the rulers of Akkad, Assyria, and Babylon kept up friendly correspondence with Egyptian pharaohs,

I haven't had much to say about the civilization of the Nile.

In this episode, though, I'm going to cover ancient Egypt's most important contribution to world

literature, the Book of the dead. Let's set aside pretenses for a minute. I think when most of us think about ancient

Egypt we see in our imaginations some combination of pyramids, sarcophagae, the sphinx, and maybe the

mask of Tootenkamun. A few more might know about the female Pharaoh had Shepset,, her warrior imperialist son, Tutmost the third,

the heretic Pharaoh Akenaten, and his successor, Ramsey's the second, the most powerful

Pharaoh in Egypt's history.

That's where things start to fall apart.

But the fact that the average person knows anything at all about this ancient civilization

is a testament to the extraordinary nature of its achievements.

Show a guy on the street a picture of the mask of Sargon, the first great conqueror of Mesopotamia,

...