The river moved slowly.

Silt filled brown water halfway between the liquefied mud and genuine waterway flowing

almost imperceptibly between the raised banks.

Boats made from woven reeds crowded the surface.

Some floated downstream, heading toward the marshes that lay between here and the sea.

Others were returning, paddling up river, laden with the necessities of life collected

in the swampy wetlands to the south of this spot.

One boat, loaded down with bundles of newly harvested reeds and baskets full of fish,

narrowly avoided a collision with another heading south on its way to pick up and snared

marsh birds.

The Euphrates River was a busy thoroughfare.

It was busy here because of where the boats were going.

Toward the massive mud brick, rammed earth, and stone buildings rising to the north,

and the city of Uruk.

As the reed crafts near the docks, the sounds of urban life washed over the boat.

He heard brain donkeys and shattering pottery, the rhythmic pounding of workers ramming

down earth for a building, mason's splitting stones, shouting and crying in the general

din of humanity when they collected together in large numbers.

He saw a bureaucrat with a neatly trimmed and oiled beard overseeing the collection of fresh

wet mud from the riverbank, the raw material on which the scribes would write down their

lists of tributes and offerings that the gods received in their temples.

The boatman couldn't read a write, of course, but he knew the arcane business when he saw

...