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You are actually radioactive, then everything alive is...
Unexpected Elements from the BBC World Service.
Search for Unexpected Elements wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
Visit Kalksternsgatan 21a in Strängnäs, and stay tuned before the weekend.
Your next car awaits you.
Welcome to Riddemark car.
Well, that's a language you don't hear very often.
That was a passage read in Arcadian by Professor Andrew George,
one of my guests on this week's forum from the BBC World Service,
and it's an extract from the epic of Gilgamesh,
a 4000-year-old poem from ancient Mesopotamia, and the subject of our programme today.
Hello, I'm Brigid Kendall.
Andrew, could you just translate that for us briefly and explain what the text means?
Yes.
What's going on here is
that the epic of Gilgamesh contains within it the story of the flood told to Gilgamesh at the end of the world by the flood hero.
The flood hero remembers how he was an eyewitness to the coming of the storm,
which brought the great flood so long ago,
and he looked up and saw on the horizon this great cloud with the gods active within it,