Mesopotamia

Down through the centuries, travelers hurried across the bleak deserts of Syria and Iraq little knowing that, only a few yards off the beaten track, cities that had once loomed over a green, fertile landscape now lay buried under blank, enigmatic mounds of earth. To the uninformed eye the skeletons of glittering royal palaces and towering temples would have been barely detectable in the glare of the punishing sun. French archaeologist Andr Parrot, however, was not such an oblivious passerby. Tramping through these wind-scoured wastes in the 1920's, Parrot heard, as he put it, the 'overtones' of humanity's earliest achievements, 'an orchestration of mighty names: Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar, ' that evoked for him not only such giants of ancient history but also whole scenes out of the Bible. - from chapter one of the book.