The Evolution of Mental Language in the Iliad and the Odyssey
Boban Dedović interviewed by Marcel Kuijsten, in Marcel Kuijsten (ed.), Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind (Julian Jaynes Society, 2022).
Summary: Boban Dedović interviewed by Marcel Kuijsten the evolution of mental language in the Iliad and Odyssey, the dating and authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Julian Jaynes’s “preconscious hypostases,” and a range of other topics.
Excerpt: Marcel Kuijsten: Let’s start with you giving us a sense of the program that you’re in right now at the University of Chicago, what it’s like, what you’ve been learning, and how that informed the study that you recently released.
Boban Dedović: Sure. Right now I’m at the University of Chicago. It’s a special graduate program that allows you to basically build your own curriculum. It is a basic thesis track and I’m only studying ancient languages. I’ve moved into the intermediate level for both Middle Egyptian and old Babylonian. The people at the Oriental Institute in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations are some of the brightest people that I’ve ever met. My thesis, which will hopefully be done by the end of the year, has to do with mental language — not surprisingly — in the Story of Sinuhe. It’s a Middle Egyptian tale about a man displaced from his home and living among Asiatic people. So that’s what I’m working on right now. I’m just trying to learn as much as I can around people that are much smarter than me on these topics. …