ABSTRACT
We face the intriguing but frustrating probability that we can never know when our species began to introspect, using words-made-thought, on the nature of existence. Nor can we know when and how our distant ancestors first communicated with each other about existential matters. All we have to go on regarding beginnings are scattered texts on moral instruction, notably from Sumerian and Egyptian sources dating from about 27th century BCE. The Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh is probably the best known of ancient (approximately 18th century BCE) texts. Death, grief, the search for immortality, leadership and the good life, the relationship between the gods and mankind, are its main themes. It also features a proto-biblical flood and motifs later taken up by Homer. The Egyptian Book of the Dead probably also dates from the time of Gilgamesh . The Indian Rigveda may date from as early as 1700 BCE and contains stories about the origins of the world, hymns to the gods, ritual use of the consciousnesschanging plant soma , death and marriage. If there is any merit in Jaynes’s (1976) thesis, Gilgamesh and similar epics may represent the shift from what he refers to as the bicameral mind (in which the early gods spoke to mankind as aural hallucinations) to the subjective consciousness we possess today, which bears the marks of introspection, analysis and mortality salience among others.
