Mesopotamia isn’t just some long-ago land that doesn’t have resonance today. “Mesopotamia was the ‘cradle of civilization’ that gave us the wheel, the 60-minute hour and, probably, the earliest system of writing. And then, too, it is a place in human consciousness – the land of the Garden of Eden and the birthplace of Abraham from which descended such biblical stories as those of Noah, the Tower of Babel and Moses.”