“My lords, gentlemen, the story of humanity cannot be written without the story of water.” Arthur clutches the edge of the lectern to stop himself from trembling. “Yet we hardly pay sufficient regard to this remarkable compound on which our lives and our futures depend. The findings that I intend to present to you today concern rivers and rainstorms, and the memory of an ancient flood. That memory, distressing as it was, has never left the people of the land that I will be talking about—Mesopotamia. As many here will already know, this word, in Greek, means ‘between rivers.’ ”
