It's the oldest story that we know anything much about.

Storytelling probably is much older than that, because we don't know anything about the stories that were told orally and never written down.

But Gilgamesh was written down.

It was written down about four and 1/2 1000 years ago.

We don't know who wrote it.

It probably comes from a Norrell tradition.

Whether they had their own homer of that period, we simply don't know.

It comes from what we call the Babylonian Empire, which is essentially modern day Iraq.

The plot is strange on DDE, in a way difficult to describe.

It concerns a king called Gil Gam ish, but Gilgamesh has a close friend called Anke do Andi.

It's essentially the story of Gilgamesh and Anke do their adventures together.

The death of inky Do Gilgamesh is deep despair and unhappiness at the death of Ankh you do on the travels that he goes on after the death of ink you do in search of immortality, which he fails to find.

It got translated into English about 120 30 years ago and became a very popular story, but its popularity to me remain something of a mystery on DDE.

I think it contrasts very starkly and in fact very poorly with the other great literatures of the ancient world that we have.

And I'm thinking here, particularly of Homer on Dove.

The Bible stories.

Now those stories and much later Homer is around 800 on the Bible.

Stories are a little bit later even than that, but in terms of interest on dhe narrative density, I think those stories are vastly more interesting than Gilgamesh is.

In order to explain why I think it's a failure as a story, at least in many ways, I need to step back a bit and say something about human psychology on DDE.

What I want to talk about is three idea of thinking on dhe thinking about thinking now Human beings think we all know that that sounds utterly trivial.

Most other animals, possibly many, even possibly all other animals don't think maybe some of the apes think nobody's quite clear about this.

So thinking is actually fairly unusual in the animal kingdom, and certainly human beings are the best at it.

But human beings don't just think they think about thinking they have what psychologists call meta cognition.

They think about thinking, and it's pretty clear that no other animal does that.

There's some slight implications that this is possible in some of the behaviour of the higher apes, but the evidence here is extremely ambiguous and very thin.

Thinking about thinking means not merely thinking what you're going tohave the dinner, but who you would like toe have dinner with Andi, who would liketo have dinner with you.

That gives us all sorts of immense powers.

It enables us to predict how other people would behave if we know what they thinking, and we know what they want.

Weaken sometimes predict what they will do.

It also very importantly, enables us to deceive other people because we can give them a night idea about what we're thinking, which is actually wrong.

Weaken deceive people into thinking that we want something when in fact we want the opposite off it.

Almost all the fiction that we have, and certainly all the fiction that we really value and it's been really popular and has lasted is fiction about meta cognition.

It's fiction about what people think about what other people think.

Shakespeare is full of stories, which hinge on whether somebody believes somebody else when they tell them what they think.

We see it in the novels of Jane Austen, where for a whole novel, she's able to sustain our interest simply by having two people who are not quite sure what they think about each other.

What's remarkable about Gilgamesh, from my point of view, is that there's no meta cognition in this story whatsoever.

It never at any point depends upon knowing what somebody else thinks about.

What you think Anka do is created by the gods who want Gil Gam ish to stop mistreating his subjects.

Gilgamesh is a king, and he's treating his subjects very badly.

The gods create thank you do as a way of distracting Gilgamesh and improving his behavior.

Nothing that thank you do does to improve your gamma.

She's behavior depends on deception.

At one point, they simply have a fight, and the fight ends in a sort of a draw between them.

Later on, the two of them decide for reasons that are not very clear, that they want to go off to the forest and kill the terrorizing Theus creature that lives in the forest.

Now, if this was a story from home, what would happen is that Gil, GAM ish and Anke do would devise a plan that would deceive the monster on would enable them to defeat this physically, much more powerful creature.

But in Gil Gam ish, that doesn't happen.

All that happens is that they have a fight with the monster and they physically overcome the monster.

Now that just isn't very interesting physical power on its own without a connection to thinking meta cognition.

Thinking about thinking just isn't very interesting.

And that's what we get time and time again in Gil Gam ish.

Well, it's a very interesting question about why a story that's this old is devoid of meta cognition.

When, say, Homer at around 800 years, BC is absolutely full of meta cognition.

So what happened between those two times?

Now some people might be tempted to say, Well, maybe at the time of Gil, Gam ish people didn't have meta cognition.

Perhaps it was a later invention that I think is almost certainly not true.

The Babylonian Sze, after all, had a vast and complex empire.

You can only sustain a vast and complex empire by having meta cognition by knowing what other people think by making pacts with your enemies, by knowing when to attack them and when not to attack them.

So why is it that in Gil Gam ish, although meta cognition presumably existed, it doesn't play a part in the story?

Well, there are a couple of possibilities here.

I think one is that perhaps we just don't have the cultural background that enables us to understand the kind of ideas underneath the text.

It Maybe it's just possible, I suppose, that people at this time would have read into the story all sorts of things about meta cognition that the story doesn't make explicit you.

We couldn't rule that out as a possibility, though I don't think there's very much evidence for it.

The other idea, I suppose, is that while meta cognition existed at this point, it just didn't have a place in the public culture.

It may there may have been all sorts of reasons why people didn't talk about meta cognition.

They there may have been religious or political reasons why talking about thinking about thinking and particularly about deception might have been not part of the public agenda.

We simply don't know really the answer to that question.