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massive stone building. Men stood atop the city’s walls, idly carrying bows over their shoulders and spears in their hands.
    â€œThis is the city of Nippur,” Noah said. “On the other side of the city is a large canal bringing water from the Euphrates River to our west, and in the distance to our south is the city of Ur. To the northwest is Babylon. To the east, near the Caspian Sea, is the land of Nod, where the Bible says Cain went to find his wife.”
    â€œBut that means there were other people besides Adam and Eve,” Paul said.
    â€œOf course there were,” Noah said. “The story of Adam and Eve is not the creation story of all humans, it’s the creation story of one particular tribe. Every tribe on earth has its own creation story, and every story is about the creation of their particular tribe, whether they came from the sun or were born from a god or fell as fruit from a tree or whatever.”
    â€œI’d never thought of it that way,” Paul said. “But it makes sense, since the Bible says Adam and Eve started out around six thousand years ago, and archeologists tell us humans have been around for two hundred thousand years. It must have been the story of the origin of the tribe we now call the Jews or Hebrews.”
    Noah shrugged as if it were self-evident, and continued. “Nod is to our east, and what was once called Eden is to our southwest. This is the land you now refer to as ancient Mesopotamia, a part of ancient Sumeria, in your time part of Iraq. It is now, at this moment as we stand here, a thousand years after the floods forced these people upland from where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers once met, and five hundred years after the invasion by the Kurgans.”
    â€œKurgans?”
    â€œThey were a herding people who lived north of here, in the areas around the Caucasus Mountains. When the climate changed and floods struck here, at the same time drought hit the Kurgans. Facing famine, theytook up the sword and began to move out of their homelands, looking for food. They spread here, down into India, east into China, and west and north into Europe. Everywhere they went, they assimilated themselves into the local peoples, as they had no empire of their own. They have become largely invisible even by now, five thousand years before you were born, because they have become these people, and the people of India, and of Asia, and of Europe. There has been a mixing of their languages, their ways, and their gods. They brought the alphabet, and that transformed culture, infected it with new ways. You could say it rewired people’s brains, made them more ruthless, literal, abstract, and willing to dominate. The left brain, the male brain, took over, because that’s the part of the brain where reading is processed.”
    â€œWe’re at some turning point in history? In the past?”
    â€œYes. It’s about 3,000 B.C., give or take a century. Five thousand years ago, from when we left your apartment.”
    â€œWhy are we here?” Paul said.
    â€œThis is your first lesson in wisdom, to prepare you for the Secret.” Noah began a brisk stride toward the city, and Paul ran and stumbled to catch up with him.
    They walked in silence; Paul felt intuitively that he shouldn’t speak, and Noah didn’t initiate a conversation. The air was hot, but Paul noticed it was so dry hewasn’t sweating. He unbuttoned the white shirt he was wearing to expose the V-neck T-shirt underneath, keeping his sleeves rolled down to protect his arms from the sun. It took about fifteen minutes to reach the walled city. They entered through a gap in the stone wall protected by soldiers playing a game with dice made of white stones. The soldiers glanced at Noah and Paul with curiosity but didn’t say anything.
    â€œThis is the Ur gate,” Noah said as they walked between tall brick pillars. Around this edge of the city, the homes were small and