 The influence of the Squatter Man event is the foundation for everything, from the earliest of times an assimilation of thought occurs where physical documentation is scarce, when the mind stands alone in remembrance, when the remembrance then becomes a distant event, and the memory stretches our imaginations to the breaking point. The stories that reach us today from the earliest of times are perceptions, a descriptive pattern of the thoughts of the ancients using story to remember actual events, and when the events become memories, when the original observers are now part of the story, questions arise, belief becomes a challenge, and we are asked as a people to show faith in the past events that we are not around to observe ourselves. The ancient stories are a message, an effort to reach across time to tell our future people of past events, a way to gently explain the things that had happened, and these ancient people have left us for us to interpret. It is now up to us to trust these efforts, to interpret these perceptions, to understand the past so we can better prepare for our future. Stories such as the Anuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh give us much more than their own reflections on evil. In many ways, they set out the terms on which later texts, thinkers and writers will debate these questions. Anuma Elish is the dualistic background against which the Genesis creation myth is written, and the dualism of the Anuma Elish will continue to haunt the Ibramic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as a shadow, a rival to their own stories of how the world began and from whence these thoughts originally manifested. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the first recorded human attempt to understand and inhabit a world where suffering happens. The world that once was has vanished, replaced by a great assembly in the sky. The epic is composed in Akkadian out of much earlier Sumerian myths of which fragments have been discovered that date to beyond 2400 BC. In Akkadian, the title of the epic is He Who Saw the Deep, and to see the deep means to see something deep about the human experience. Even in the Akkadian text, people understood that the Epic of Gilgamesh was an incredibly profound event witnessed during a time of disastrous confusion. Gilgamesh is a hard king over the citizens of his city. Uruk, and to stop him from being so oppressive towards his citizens, the gods create Enkeder as Gilgamesh's equal. And so Enkeder is going to be Gilgamesh's friend, though he is called part animal and part human, whereas Gilgamesh is part god and part human. Theirs is the story of a great friendship. When they fight, they realise that they are well matched and become inseparable. And they go on many legendary adventures together. They travel to the Cedar Mountain, probably in Lebanon, and defeat Humbaba, the ogreish guardian of the mountain. They kill the Bull of Heaven, who was sent by the goddess Ishtar to punish Gilgamesh for spurning her seduction. But this murder of the Bull of Heaven doesn't go down well with the other gods in the sky, and so they kill Enkeder as punishment. At the death of his friend, Gilgamesh is distraught. He's also terrified of death, realising it will come to him one day, just as it did Enkeder. So, to assuage his grief and palliate his fear, he undertakes a quest to find the key to immortality, by undertaking a long and perilous journey to meet the ancient and immortal flood hero Uttanapishtam. After many difficulties, he finally meets the man face to face, but the man is now old, he's unwilling or unable to help, and tells Gilgamesh this, The life that you are seeking, you will never find. When the gods created man, they allotted him to death, but life, they retained in their own keeping. As expected, Gilgamesh's efforts do eventually fail, and he collapses weeping in grief for his beloved friend. He then returns to Uruk, where the sight of its massive walls prompts him to praise this enduring work, work solely of the human hands. Perhaps this recognition of the achievement of the human effort is a sign that Gilgamesh has begun to find a way out of this bitter despair. This indicates a slow turning back towards a merely human life. Gilgamesh's journey are, in this way, an allegory for every human's journey through life. There comes a moment in every person's life when we know that death is now our future, and then we must decide what to do with that knowledge. He who saw the deep may refer to a deeper understanding rather than looking into the deep, or perhaps it's the earth that is the deep, and if that is the case, then the setting takes place in the sky. At the moment of the realisation of human achievement, Gilgamesh seeks to worship the gods in the sky. You have to wonder about the physical reality on this planet during these times of catastrophic fear, but would you guys think about this anyway? Comments below and as always, thank you for watching.