"Thousands of years ago, in a part of the world we now call ancient Mesopotamia, people began writing things down for the very first time.What they left behind, in a vast region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, preserves leaps in human ingenuity, like the earliest depiction of a wheel and the first approximation of pi.... the world's first cities, the first writing system, early seeds of agriculture, and groundbreaking developments in medicine and astronomy"--