 What we're doing is recovering the world's oldest literatures and making it available for the modern world. Saaas is an extraordinary place. When I was 30, all I'd ever wanted was to become a lecturer at Saaas. I'd just finished my PhD and I was looking for a job at Saaas. All I'd ever wanted was to become a lecturer at Saaas. I'd just finished my PhD and I was looking around for a new research topic and someone suggested that I make a critical edition of Gilgamesh which hadn't been done for more than 50 years at that time and I've been doing Gilgamesh ever since. I used to spend a day and a half in the British Museum making drawings of cuneiform tablets. It took me seven years to finish the Gilgamesh tablets. But of course there's also archaeological work going on in the Middle East which brings to light more and more cuneiform tablets and so every so often excavations throw out more Gilgamesh. I think I'm the go-to person for Gilgamesh nowadays because I've been working on it for so long. I wrote a critical edition after visiting all the tablets in the different museums and collections and published that in 2003 but since then many, many new fragments have appeared. So by this time there were 90,000 tablets in the British Museum and two people who could read them. And it's still a bit like that. Assyriology is beset by two problems. Vast quantities of tablets, something like half a million in the museums of the world and a tiny number of people who can decipher them. So in this way we ensure that assyriology will last forever. Gilgamesh is of special value because not only is it the oldest long poem in human history, 4,000 years old, but also it's a piece of literature which modern readers can engage with. It's about what it is to be human. Because it talks to us about ourselves, about the human condition, what it is to be human as opposed to an animal, what it is to be human as opposed to a god and what it is to die and what it is to be so afraid of death that you'll do anything to stop dying. It's something that catches the imagination of its readership. So for me one of the most rewarding things is when I get messages from people who've come across my work and say that it's inspired them to paint a painting or to make a piece of music or to write a poem. This seems to me the job of a person like me, a scholar like me as an assyriologist at SOAS. To communicate what I find in my field to the greater public and to those people who are fascinated by what it is to be human, what it is to be alive.