S8 Ep264: GILGAMESH AND THE BIRTH OF WRITTEN LEGEND Colleague Moudhy Al-Rashid. Al-Rashid discusses Cuneiform, a writing system used for over 3,000 years to record languages like Sumerian and Akkadian. She details the Epic of Gilgamesh, a tale of a tyrannical king

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 30 December 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

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GILGAMESH AND THE BIRTH OF WRITTEN LEGEND Colleague Moudhy Al-Rashid. Al-Rashid discusses Cuneiform, a writing system used for over 3,000 years to record languages like Sumerian and Akkadian. She details the Epic of Gilgamesh, a tale of a tyrannical king who finds wisdom and friendship with the wild man Enkidu. While Gilgamesh was likely a real historical figure, his story evolved into high poetry about mortality and leadership. The segment notes that kingship was believed to have descended from heaven. NUMBER 3
1896 UR

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0:34.9	This is CBSI on the world.
0:36.9	I'm John Batchel.
0:38.4	Between Two Rivers, I'm spending time with the author,
0:40.9	Mudi al-Rashid, ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History.
0:45.2	This is a teacher of languages and culture at Oxford University
0:50.8	who's going to introduce us to storytelling
0:53.6	3,000, 4,000 years ago, just like today.
0:58.2	But the story they all liked, just as we today have our favorites, Paul Bunyan, for example,
1:04.6	the story they are liked is a king named Gilgamesh. He was nine feet tall, goes the yarn,
1:15.4	and he was cruel. and then he met a companion,
1:22.4	and that companion guided him to understand the generosity and justice were the role of a king once upon a time. However, how do we know this? What were the languages that were in a commonplace in
1:30.7	Uruk and Orr and Kish and Babylon? And how are those languages remembered and conquered?
1:38.9	I'm greatly privileged to be speaking to someone who can not only read Sumerian, but she can speak Sumerian.
1:46.5	Moody, Sumerian is the older, Acadian is the newer. What do we need to know about those languages and how they were used?
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