Perhaps the history we seek begins in Uruk, a settlement on the Eastern bank of the Euphrates, 225km from modern Baghdad. Uruk, which may be the origin of the modern country-name Irak, was at its height in the 3rd millennium BCE and is important to this history because there was a temple there (Cassin et al, 1982: 42), that is to say, a place of meeting for the human community, an incipient vestige of a great civilization: the Chaldean and the Babylonian. This city is described at the beginning of one of the oldest jewels of literature: the epic poem of Gilgamesh, who was at one time King...