The Tigris is an old river and like everything that has lived for that long, it is liquid memory. “Fast-moving” in Old Persian, “arrowlike” in its inexhaustible agility. The Ancients called it “the tiger.” Idigna in Sumerian, Hiddekel in Hebrew, Dijlah in Arabic, Ava Mezin in Kurdish—“the Great Water.” One of the four streams believed to have flowed out of the Garden of Eden, it gleams with unearthly light, frightening and beautiful and mysterious, nurturing life above and below the ground. Rising in the highlands of Anatolia, fed by fertile tributaries, falling rain and melting snow, it
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