Transcription
Story of Seduction, the wrath of God, and Paradise Lost. But is it merely a fable? Is there evidence the great stories of the Bible might be true? Was there ever really such a place as Eden?
Today, the search for the Garden of Eden leads us to a dry and desolate land, to a place called Mesopotamia. This is the land where the first seeds of human civilization were sown, and it was here that three of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world flourished: Babylon, Assyria, and Sumer. Among their ruins, the faithful of Longs sought answers to the Bible's most profound mysteries, while archaeologists scoured these lands for the historical foundations of belief.
Our quest for Eden is a journey back in time, first to Babylon, the last of these lost civilizations, then further into the past to the Assyrians, fierce masters of the art of war, and finally to a moment in the past so distant, only Eden could have preceded it: to Sumer and the creation of civilization itself.
The great Ark of the Fertile Crescent. Over the course of more than 6,000 years, this rich land, cradled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, gave birth to the first great civilizations. The Greeks called it Mesopotamia; we call it Iraq. By peeling back the layers of history here, we can trace the origins of our oldest stories and travel back to the deepest roots of faith.
Our journey begins on the western edge of Mesopotamia, in Israel. A chance discovery in 1947 would rivet the world's attention to archaeology and to the Bible. Two Bedouin shepherds are moving a herd of goats along the cliffs of Qumran, a few miles east of Jerusalem. In the sunbaked desert, they notice a small cave, obscured by a rocky slope. Curious, one begins to climb. It's not uncommon for ancient and valuable artifacts to be found along these bluffs. Inside the cave, the shepherd discovers the wreckage of ancient pots, leather scroll fragments, and some papyrus sheets, all untouched since the time of Jesus. These writings, by an obscure Jewish sect called the Essenes, would come to be known throughout the world as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In surrounding caves, hundreds of ancient scrolls would eventually be unearthed. One of them would prove to be the earliest known version of the Old Testament, including the crucial first five books, known to the Jews as the Torah. The Dead Sea Scrolls instantly became the focus of a tremendous international uproar, as scholars and theologians fought over their ownership and their meaning. And their sensation was outstanding. This was described as one of the most outstanding archaeological finds anywhere. So they're very precious to the Jews because they are Jewish. They come from a very crucial period in Jewish history. They are very precious to the Christians because they are contemporaneous with John the Baptist and Jesus and so on. So they are very informative. But beyond that, we have a great emotional attachment to this library.
The Bible has always been a book read from two points of view: the sacred and the historical. A traditional Torah is always written by hand. The words are read aloud as the scribe writes, so they become a living prayer, and each Torah is considered holy from the moment it is written. But the historical accuracy of the Bible has never been so easily confirmed. It's an effort that continues to this day. Some of the books of the Bible are excellent historical books. As a matter of fact, the earliest historical books that we have, and quite accurate because we have cross-references from other sources, and they are found to be most very precise. So they're very important.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was the most famous event in biblical archaeology, but it was by no means the first. The urge to explore biblical history has a venerable tradition. It's a search that began in the Holy Land but would lead to Mesopotamia. Throughout history, Crusaders, mystics, and believers have been drawn to sites where the great Bible stories took place. But with the arrival of the 19th century, a new kind of pilgrim sought to fortify their belief in the Bible through the infant science of archaeology. Surely, there could be no greater confirmation of their faith than to prove that biblical history was true.
The first aim of the biblical archaeologist was to locate sites mentioned prominently in the biblical narratives and to see if any illustration of those tales could be found. To use the ancient pottery, the ancient city walls, the ancient weapons as illustrations of biblical stories that all of them had been taught from their childhood. Fueled by the excitement of early finds, scholars from all over the world raced to stake out claims in a kind of biblical gold rush. Competing British, German, and French archaeologists descended on the Holy Land, teams of theological detectives digging for both God and country. The prestige of each of the European nations in the Holy Land was measured by the kind of biblical discoveries that they were uncovering.
And one of the most intense diplomatic and political battles that occurred in the history of biblical archaeology was the discovery of the famous Moabite Stone in 1868. Deep in the land of Moab, Bedouin of the Beni Hamida tribe stumbled onto a mysterious stone tablet, buried in the desert. The tribesmen were no strangers to the antiquities of the area or to their value to Europeans. The first Westerner to hear of the curious black stone was the Reverend Frederick Augustus Klein. He immediately set off through the bandit-infested wasteland, accompanied only by a few Bedouin guides. Klein was a missionary, not an archaeologist. When he first saw the peculiar basalt carving, he felt a rush of excitement, suspecting the black tablet might confirm his deepest held beliefs. He examined the stone and made a rough impression of the inscription. It was in a language Klein didn't recognize.
Back in Jerusalem, he sought help deciphering the stone. As news of the find began to spread, the streets and bazaars buzzed with rumors of a great discovery. The writing on the stone proved to be a Moabite king's account of a battle also described in the Bible. For the first time ever, here was written confirmation, etched in stone, of a story from the Bible. Two sources for the same event. For the faithful, it was the proof they'd been looking for, concrete evidence of the Bible's historical accuracy. Many sought to buy the stone, but the Bedouin had reason to be wary. In the past, they'd been cheated, even robbed by European treasure hunters. Assuming that anything so highly prized by Europeans must contain gold, they dumped the stone into a fire in an attempt to break it apart. As fire heated the stone, they poured water over it again and again, until finally, it exploded. They found no gold, and the stone was destroyed. The first archaeological confirmation of a Bible story, the first corroborating evidence ever found in the Holy Land, was shattered.
The loss of the stone was devastating, but it didn't end the biblical treasure hunt. Now that the Bible itself was verified as history, it pointed the way even further into the past, back more than 2,500 years ago, to a great empire ruled from Babylon, to the very moment the Bible itself was born.
The year is 586 BC. The armies of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, descend on Jerusalem with the wrath of an angry God. It is almost six centuries before the birth of Christ. The Romans have not yet even dreamed of empire. It is a dark chapter in the history of the Jews, while Babylon's fierce star is rising. The Bible describes the Babylonian attack: homes are pillaged, King Solomon's Temple is set ablaze and utterly destroyed. 10,000 Israelite captives, princes, soldiers, artisans, and scribes, all are led to Babylon in chains. The Israelites crossed more than 500 miles of desert, following ancient trade routes across modern-day Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, to Babylon. In Psalms 137, the Israelites lament: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" Broken and exhausted, the Israelites entered Babylon in awe of its scope and frenzy. Torn from the modest city of Jerusalem, they beheld the majestic capital of the ancient world.
But somehow, the Israelites managed to do more than sing the Lord's song in this foreign land. They also wrote it down. If you look at any piece of oral literature and then you write it down, you're formalizing it. You're immediately setting down a text which people can criticize or can say, "This is the truth. Everything else is wrong." That, I think, is the biggest effect of writing down the Bible or the Old Testament.
Today, the reconstructed walls surrounding Babylon are stamped with the name Saddam Hussein, but once the bricks bore another name: King Nebuchadnezzar. This was a land of many gods and pagan idols, an unlikely birthplace for one of the world's most sacred texts. Yet, Babylon's great diversity created the perfect climate. They come into this cosmopolitan environment, even the most educated among them and literate among them, were being bombarded with direct contact with other people. And I mean, other people. The Israelites found themselves in a melting pot of different races and languages, conflicting gods, and alien demons. "What city is this?" the Book of Revelation would ask, "Clothed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and pearls, the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, Babylon the great, mother of harlots and the abominations of the Earth."
But among all the abominations, even perhaps because of them, this was where the Bible first became a book. Threatened by an overwhelming new culture, Hebrew scribes were desperate to preserve and solidify Jewish identity. Over three generations of captivity, the scribes unified Israel's oral tradition, new writings, and sacred texts into a single manuscript. The Bible was born. Fortunately for them, the Babylonians were pretty liberal. They allowed them to keep their own culture, their own religion, to study their own books. This is what preserved the Bible to this very day.
But as the books of the Bible came together over the long years of exile, Babylonian culture would profoundly influence the work of the Israelite scribes. These were very literate people. I suspect many of the people who went into exile and scribes talked to scribes, and I'm sure that was how a lot of information was transmitted. And the exchange of ideas and knowledge must have been, I would use the word, devastating. It must have been mind-blowing. The Bible would eventually reflect stories and traditions from Babylon and even earlier Mesopotamian civilizations.
The Israelites couldn't easily ignore Babylon's thriving culture and great monuments. Its temples were among the largest structures in the ancient world, big public buildings, the ceremonial walkway, the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar with its legendary Hanging Gardens, palm trees, the river. If you had walked through the Ishtar Gate, you would have felt the awe, and this was deliberate. You were in the presence of something powerful. But on all sides of it was the city, the people, the commoners, narrow winding alleyways, rows and rows of small stores, donkeys braying, crowds of people walking, small, closely knit quarters teeming with life.
And it was here, the Bible tells us, that one of antiquity's most extraordinary monuments soared into the sky: the Tower of Babel. For ages, adventurers and pilgrims hoped that finding the famous tower would prove the truth of Bible stories. One seeker who failed would write, "No man dare go near to the tower, for it is all desert and full of dragons and great serpents and full of diverse venomous beasts." Medieval travelers claimed they had found the tower, this spiral minaret still standing in Northern Iraq, but they were wrong. This tower was built 1,500 years too late and far from the walls of Babylon.
Perhaps the most intriguing possibility was posed by Robert Koldewey, a German archaeologist in the early 1900s. He discovered a rectangular ditch with only a few ancient bricks remaining. Many experts believe Koldewey had found all that survives of the famous tower. Babylon's great monuments made a strong impression on the biblical scribes, but her most enduring legacy, surviving to this day, is a Babylonian innovation far more impressive still: the rule of law.
Babylon was the first civilization on Earth to have a written legal code. The original carved stone is an astonishing relic, lost for hundreds of years. It would emerge in the late 19th century, a stone engraved with one of the most important legal documents of all time. 1,200 years before the Israelites were taken captive, a Babylonian king had this stone carved with the laws that bear his name: Hammurabi's Code. These writings can be read as precursors to the legal code in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. In societies where knowledge and law is transmitted orally and dealt with orally, precedent is terribly important. But when it got written down, the people who wrote it down had immense power.
Hammurabi's Code has influenced nearly every civilization since Babylon. Today, even some of its more primitive methods of judgment survive virtually intact. Hammurabi described a ritual called the ordeal, a painful, even deadly, test of guilt or innocence. In some remote Bedouin tribes, the ordeal is still practiced much as it was in the time of Hammurabi.
In this rare footage, a holy man called the Mubashir will judge the accused by examining their tongues after they lick a red-hot iron spoon. These men have been accused of theft. They must submit to the ordeal or be found guilty by default. Family members look on anxiously as the young men prepare themselves for the painful ritual. The water doesn't ease the pain. It's meant to cleanse and purify the drinker and to ready him for judgment. The holy man prays and then examines the singed tongues, seeking a sign from God. Only the Mubashir can divine guilt or innocence, and he alone will determine the men's fate. At last, a verdict. One man is found innocent, to the great relief of his family. The other is not as fortunate, declared guilty. He will be fined for his crime.
The ordeal is an intriguing modern-day echo of Hammurabi, but his laws reach even more directly into the present through the Bible. "Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." The Ten Commandments, the foundation of biblical law. And yet, only the beginning of a complex set of codes and covenants central to the Old Testament. And in these laws, the clear voice of Hammurabi can still be heard. Hammurabi set down laws. He didn't innovate a great deal. He merely set down in writing laws which had operated by and large for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," and principles like this, many of which are still codified in law today.
But the Babylon that shaped the Bible and its laws had its roots in an even earlier civilization, one that reached its peak seven centuries before Christ. It was the brutal empire of Assyria, a place the Bible called "a land bathed in blood." Deadliest of all Mesopotamian armies to sweep through the ancient world were the Assyrians. In the Bible, they are the ultimate symbol of bloody tyranny and ruthless oppression. A hundred years before Nebuchadnezzar took the Israelites captive in Babylon, the Bible tells us the Assyrian King Sennacherib attacked the lands of the Israelites. In the second book of Kings, the Bible says, "Behold, what the kings of Assyria have done to our lands, destroying them utterly." The Assyrians were ruled by despotic kings. They believed in absolute power. Now, absolute power means control, and absolute power almost invariably is kept in power by military efficiency and might. And the Assyrians maintained an enormously powerful and efficient war machine.
And on the walls of Assyrian kings' palaces were the chronicles of some of their expeditions, written in vain-glorious, grandiloquent terms. The Assyrians, they would take a city and they would stack up the heads of the leading citizens outside the gate, or they would take the king of the of the city and flay him alive and nail his skin to the wall, or something like that. But everybody did that. Assyrian power, symbolized by the Royal Lion Hunt, lay in the hands of merciless warrior kings. Even the Bible betrays grudging admiration: "Behold the Assyrian, under his shadow dwelt all great nations." Ezekiel 31. When the city of Rome was in its infancy, Assyria was the greatest empire in the world for more than a thousand years.
Details of Assyrian civilization were few. Even its great capital city of Nineveh was unknown to the modern world. Then, in 1852, these desolate ruins were explored by British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard. What Layard found here in Northern Iraq was nothing less than the Royal Palace of Nineveh, an unspoiled treasure of Assyrian civilization. Tunneling like a miner through the earth, Layard uncovered great winged bulls and spectacular artistry, hidden from human view for a millennium. The world was stunned and excited by his breakthrough. Nineveh was another biblical city found, yet more confirmation of the Bible's historical accuracy.
But the most momentous of Layard's discoveries was The Great Library of Nineveh, an extraordinary collection of 22,000 clay tablets inscribed with the cuneiform writing of the Assyrians. The only direct communication that we have with the people of the ancient world, really, is what they left behind in their writings. We can know from that what they ate, what their medical treatments were, what their family life was like, what their politics was like, how they viewed religion. Details of Assyrian daily life reveal a patriarchal society, a world where commoners, and especially women, had little status. Every Assyrian woman, once in her early life, before marriage, would go to the Temple of Ishtar, and she would sit on the steps, and she would wait there until some man came along and dropped a coin on the hem of her dress, and then she would go inside with him and do her thing, and that was it.
Yet, in this despotic world, there was a kind of justice. In marriage, even a wife had certain rights. A woman could specify in her marriage contract that her husband would have no other wives. She might specify that he could have all the prostitutes he wanted, but no other wives. But if ordinary women had only limited status, recent discoveries reveal Assyrian queens enjoyed great privilege. In 1989, the ancient Palace of Nimrud in Northern Iraq set the stage for a startling find. Experts called it "the most significant discovery since King Tut's tomb." The Treasure of Nimrud.
While we were cleaning some of the rooms, we discovered that there's some indications for a vaulting underneath the floor. We took everything out and we tried to sort it, and we discovered that we have here the bodies of at least two queens. Solid gold bracelets still adorned their bones, a royal treasure entombed more than 2,000 years ago. This remarkable footage, shot by Iraqi archaeologists, is an exclusive record of their extraordinary discoveries. For the very first time, the tomb of an Assyrian queen had been uncovered intact. The royal seal still displayed a curse to protect its occupants: "Should anyone break open the seal and remove me from my tomb, let his spirit roam in thirst under the bitter rays of the sun, and may the great gods of the underworld inflict his corpse and ghost with eternal restlessness."
Ignoring the curse, archaeologists excavated more than 125 pounds of beautifully crafted jewelry, crystal goblets, and exquisite carvings. The ancient Assyrians were master goldsmiths and artisans. But the value of this treasure far exceeds its worth in gold. In death, Assyrian queens were lavished with riches, but in life, it was her kings who forged history, kings with a taste for empire.
In the year 701 BC, King Sennacherib and his army struck out across the desert toward the Mediterranean Sea. The bold Assyrians were determined to conquer all that lay in their path. The cities of Judah, including Jerusalem and its rebellious King Hezekiah. Fortress after fortress fell to the Assyrians, but it was the city of Lachish whose brutal destruction is best recorded in the historical record and in the Bible. The siege of Lachish is a beautiful example of how an Assyrian army descended on a city, surrounded it, besieged it, reduced it, and took away its inhabitants into slavery. Those that were not executed, men, women, and children. Their technique was very simple: it was brutal conquest, fast-moving conquest, systematic, efficient conquest. And on the bas-reliefs in Assyrian palaces, you see the siege engines, the soldiers moving up the mounds with the shields above them, protecting them from the debris thrown down below. But they had no hope in hell. Those guys were professional soldiers. It was a machine.
From the capital city of Jerusalem, King Hezekiah knew an Assyrian attack was inevitable. He raced to fortify the city and ordered an underground aqueduct dug, a desperate effort to protect the city's water supply in the face of a siege. Hezekiah's plan worked. The Bible tells us, "The Lord saved Jerusalem, and the king of Assyria returneth shamefaced to his own land." Sennacherib's version of the conflict was found on a clay prism unearthed at Nineveh. It matches the Bible story down to the smallest details, but its point of view is sharply different. "But as for Hezekiah the Jew, who did not bow down in submission to my yoke, 46 of his strong walled towns I besieged and conquered. The awful splendor of my lordship overwhelmed him." Stories are told from different angles, but they are in agreement. If you'll have to tell about what happened today, and I'll have to tell, we'll tell different stories. We have the story of Sennacherib invading to this country. Each tells basically about the same historical event with absolutely no contradictions, no contradictions. But one, the result. In Sennacherib's version, Hezekiah is shut up in Jerusalem like a caged bird. But in the Bible, the Assyrian armies are held back by Jerusalem's walls. It is perhaps the earliest example of spin doctors at work. "The God of the Israelites has the last word. I will break the Assyrian in my land," the Bible says. "For through the voice of the Lord shall the Assyrian be beaten down." Isaiah, chapter 6. And the Bible tells us, God does destroy Nineveh, throne of the great Assyrian kings.
It wasn't the first such annihilation. Long before, the Almighty had laid waste an entire civilization. There is not a single mention of their name in the Bible, but they were called Sumer, and they told the story of a great flood.
It's one of the most familiar of all Bible stories: The Saga of Noah's Ark. An angry God, a wooden boat, a deluge. It's the story of Noah and his family escaping to the ark with every species of animal and surviving the punishing flood while the rest of mankind is destroyed. It's a primal tale, stirring our deepest hopes and fears, a story found in the Bible, but also in another ancient text, a text discovered in the ruins of Sumer early this century. A group of Mesopotamian tablets were translated. They revealed the earliest known legend of a cataclysmic flood, the world's very first written epic. It is the story of the mythic King Gilgamesh. His tale of a great flood predates the Bible's by at least 2,000 years. "For seven days and seven nights the flood had swept over the land, and the huge boat had been tossed about by the storms. The boat then runs aground on a mountain. He sends out birds," which is the story which has an eerie similarity to the story of the biblical flood. It's a wonderful story.
More than 5,000 years ago, the story of the great flood was first told here, in the ancient cities of Sumer: Uruk, Eridu, and Ur. In Ur, we find the first of almost everything that makes us civilized. They invented the wheel, government, and gardening. Sumer, the first civilization on Earth. In a land without stone, they devised mud bricks, like those still made and used today, and from these simple building blocks, they erected the first great monuments called ziggurats, towering temples soaring hundreds of feet into the air. The Sumerians invented the 60-minute hour and even the troubled teenager: "Where did you go?" "I didn't go anywhere." "If you didn't go anywhere, why do you idle about? Go to school. Stand before your teacher. Recite your homework. Write your tablet. Do you understand me?"
We know about the Sumerians, their startling innovations, and their everyday lives, thanks to their most impressive invention: writing. We know their ancient legends and their intimate secrets because someone wrote them down. It was something no one had ever done before. It's a window, but it's a window that's composed of many panes, some of which we can see through, and some of which we can't. Um, we, we lack much more than we have. So while what we have is spectacular in some cases, we always have to bear in mind that there are parts of the daily lives of people that we can never see, and which we may never see, because they're people that those writing the tablets didn't care about.
5,000 years ago, someone etched their stories into clay, providing us with a glimpse of the world in the first blush of civilization. As a people, the Sumerians were, in some ways, much like ourselves. They are concerned about meeting other people and drinking beer and so on. And there were several collections of poems which relate the preparations of a woman for her lover, and how she dresses and waits for her lover to come.
The center of Sumerian civilization was the lost city of Ur, once thought to be the birthplace of Abraham, the first of the Bible's patriarchs. It is the epitome of the biblical city in archaeological terms because it was the site of one of the most famous archaeological digs ever carried out in the 1920s and '30s by a remarkable British archaeologist called Leonard Woolley. A British archaeologist once described archaeology as "the science of rubbish," which is so true. But give me the archaeologist who can make the stones and the bones and the bricks and the pots come alive. Leonard Woolley was like that. He would take people on a tour of a small quarter of Ur, of the Citadel, where the house foundations are exposed, and as you walked through, he would talk about the lives of the people who lived in these houses, talk about the ovens, the sills, the low ceilings, the furniture. And Ur, in Woolley's hands, came alive.
Woolley dug this enormous pit, and he went down through the city, and it got smaller and smaller, and then there was this deep, sterile layer of silt. And Woolley himself recounts how his wife came over, looked at it, and she was a rather casual lady in some ways, and looked at it and said, "Oh, well, of course, that's the flood." And lights went off. And Woolley claimed that this was evidence of the biblical flood, and it captured the popular imagination. What did it do? It brought in money, and Ur was a dig that was sold brilliantly.
Speculation about the biblical flood caused a sensation, even without solid proof. It was as if science and the Bible had united. In the bleak desert of Southern Iraq, Woolley would eventually unearth an indisputable treasure, a discovery that provided extraordinary insight into this earliest of civilizations: the Royal Tombs of Ur. Digging in the thick mud, Woolley uncovered 74 carefully arranged skeletons, all entombed at the same time. The burial told the shocking story of a king's final journey into the afterlife and of those who accompanied him. And from this, he developed a remarkable story of a predynastic royal funeral. And his story went something like this: First, they dug this big pit with a ramp up one side. In the pit, they erected a bier of stone, in which the body of the royal personage was placed. Then the entire court filed into the pit, everybody lined up and stood there with little clay pots in their hands, and then at a signal, they all drank poison, lay down, and died. So the prince went to his grave accompanied by all his retainers. This has become one of the great discoveries, one of the great funeral accounts of archaeology in early history.
The discovery of the grave pits at Ur was a triumph of archaeology, revealing ancient secrets of the first civilization. But science alone can take us only so far. Where the trail ends, The Epic of Gilgamesh provides the final tantalizing clues, clues leading us back to a garden and a place some call Paradise.
Ah, the Garden of Eden. "In the beginning, God created the world." It's a familiar story. You get these sort of creation myths in almost every society on Earth. It's a very compelling longing of people for a better world. Gardens of Eden, paradises, are people's longing for a less complicated life, or a life of ease, or a reward for having worked so hard.
In the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the name given to paradise is Dilmun. It's a place beyond the edge of normal human habitation. That's how it features in the Sumerian flood myth. That's where the flood survivor goes to live. And there are other myths which feature Dilmun as a place where everything was perfect. Dilmun figures in Mesopotamian legend as a sort of Garden of Eden, as a sort of paradise, a place of verdant green and abundant water and cool winds and breezes. It is a place of wonder, a perfect place. Yet, it is also home to a serpent. In the ancient epic, the snake steals away the flower that bestows immortality, and so, like Adam, Gilgamesh must leave the garden and die.
The idea of paradise seems universal, but what is it based on? Was there ever really such a place? The clues point to an enchanted, yet very real, location. 400 miles south of the ancient Sumerian city of Ur lies the island of Bahrain, a pivotal marketplace on the trade routes across the arid deserts and salt seas of Mesopotamia. Today, Bahrain is something less than paradise, but it was once lush. Once, this island had abundant water, and thus, abundant life. Once long ago, this was Dilmun.
But was it paradise? By comparison to the surrounding desert, it would certainly have seemed so. There was so much water here that what is now a desert island bloomed. It was a garden bearing lush fruit, and there were people here who apparently led a blessed life. More than 85,000 burial mounds dot this landscape, probably the most in any one location in the ancient world. The ancient bones tell us these people were taller and healthier, and they lived longer than anyone else in the region. And in the burial mounds is one more astonishing clue: the remains of snakes, ritually entombed at some lost moment more than 4,000 years ago. Here in Bahrain, we find the serpent, just as we found it in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and just as we found it in the Bible.
Our journey back in time has crossed the lands where the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the ancient Sumerians once walked the Earth. Is it possible to venture even farther?