Literature and history

Hello and welcome to literature and history. Episode 41, everything so far.

In this show we'll consider where we've been over the course of more than 500,000 words and 75 hours of literature and history and where we're going next.

Having most recently finished Apollonius's

Jason and the Argonauts now,

and having talked about Hellenistic history

and religion in the previous episode,

we're hanging out around 200 bc. E. Romans are locking

swords with Hannibal and Carthage during the Second Punic War and the next major

section of our show will involve a long and I mean long dive

into the literature of ancient Rome. Thousands of years of fascinating history lie ahead in literature too, but a lot lies behind us as well.

Let's talk about that.

We started this show with Kuneiform. In fact, we started with rain falling on the tops of the

tourists and Pontic ranges in southern Turkey, eroding those mountains and sending them down into the headwaters of the Euphrates,

thereafter pushing and swirling silt for thousands of miles across the Mesopotamian desert, where in the southeast of of clay bricks, clay statues, and most importantly, clay tablets.

These Mesopotamian clay tablets gave us our first three stories,

the Babylonian creation story, the Anuma Elish, and the

Babylonian flood story, the Atra Hossis, both written long before the Book of

Genesis. A flood also showed up in our third text, the Epic of Gilgamesh,

that ancient king of Sumerian Urak, who befriended the warrior Enkido, fought the monster Humbaba, and the bowl of heaven, and unsuccessfully

sought eternal life.

The next few shows were on ancient Egypt. Reading the Book of the Dead, we learned that the ideas of

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