The Angel of Eden by D. J. McIntosh Page B

the future. Nevertheless, his prediction, coupled with the previous night’s sleep paralysis, pushed me to make an appointment to see my doctor later that afternoon.
    As I leafed through Samuel’s journals I finally left my fears behind to focus on another mystery—an ancient one. The Sumerian artifacts Strauss had shown us, and his claim that they’d been found near Kandovan rather than southern Iraq, intrigued me. For scholars, the Sumerians posed a giant enigma. Evidence of their presence showed up in southern Iraq between 3500 and 3100 B.C ., a period associated with the onset of large-scale agriculture and the development of the first cities. But no one could prove their origins. Their language had no known affiliates, modern or ancient. Strauss’s artifacts had been dated to around that time but from a place hundreds of miles to the northeast. Had the ancient Sumerians in southern Iraq simply grown out of the indigenous Ubaid culture that preceded them or were they especially gifted migrants from a different region?
    The various theories—they came by boat from the Ganges river basin or they were a displaced Semitic people—were nothing more than guesswork.
    Although Samuel respected the efforts to trace ethnic origins through pottery, written language, and physical remains, he believed the answers lay in their mythology. “They have told us where they came from in their stories,” Samuel wrote, “and we only need to listen.” Based on a myth, he’d concluded that the Sumerians were originally mountain people, pushed out of their domain by some calamity, environmental perhaps. In the early third millennium B.C. they moved down to the southern fertile marshes near the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates, where theiradvanced culture allowed them to dominate the people already living there.
    The myth described a legendary conflict between Enmerkar, the king of Uruk, an early Sumerian city state in southern Iraq, and the lord of Aratta, a mountain kingdom in northern Iran. The two regions had a similar language and culture along with a trading relationship—grain from Uruk traded for precious metals and wood from Aratta. Another myth gave a concise description of the mountain kingdom.
    Aratta’s battlements are of green lapis lazuli, its walls and its towering brickwork are bright red, their brick clay is made of tinstone dug out in the mountains where the cypress grows.
    Inanna, the principal goddess of Uruk, was originally a mountain deity from Aratta. As I read, it became clear to me that the people of the two regions had so many similarities they were essentially part of the same Sumerian culture. But more important, insofar as my quest was concerned, Strauss’s artifacts came from the same area in northwestern Iran that the myth called Aratta. The last line in Samuel’s journal surprised me.
    He’d pointed out that the word for the mountain plain where Aratta was located was Edin .
    According to the Sumerians, who carefully recorded their history, Edin was a real place. Could this have anything to do with Helmstetter’s reference to Eden in his last letter to Veronica Sills? I wished once more that my brother was alive so I could discuss the idea with him. I had only his writings left to try to decipher. In the margin beside this entry he’d written Reginald Arthur Walker . I didn’t recognize the name and wondered why Samuel had put it there.
    I glanced at my watch and reluctantly shut the journal, realizing that if I didn’t leave now, I’d be late for my doctor’s appointment.
    Bennet was still immersed in my notes, and when I stuck my head in to let her know I was going out, she mumbled what sounded like “’Kay.”
    â€œCan Loki stay with you?”
    She nodded without looking up. Leaving her alone in my apartment seemed incautious, but I reasoned that if she wanted to look through anything, or worse, steal,