In school I remember learning the name Mesopotamia -- a lumpy, oddly beautiful word -- and since then I have associated it with the nebulous beginnings of important things: love letters, accounting, domesticated wheat. I think the history books showed a map of where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers embraced, alongside that fetching phrase, "the cradle of civilization." This, I was taught, is where writing began.
So it seems I owe a great debt to lovely Mesopotamia, which is why I keep going back to her for clues. What does it mean to be civilized, and for what purpose? Why was writing born at all? And when did writing and farming, the two great manual labors, forget that they were related, and once played together in the mud?
