Chapter 2

Robert Langdon looked at his watch with earnest will. 2:37, Mickey told him. He looked up at the classroom before him.

"Yeah, John," he said, calling on the boy with his hand raised.

"I don't understand," the boy said, leaning back. He moved his hands in front of him, in a way a politician would. " I mean, the Sumerians, and the Fertile Crescent, and all were sort of the first to actually be civilized. They had cuneiform and all of that, but we don't hear about that nearly as much as we do other civilizations. Aren't they important?"

"You hear about them all the time," replied Langdon. He felt like he had been answering the same question all day. "You can't say you haven't heard of 'an eye for an eye', Hammurabi's code. If you haven't heard of that, then how the hell did you get into this school?"

"Yeah, but that's from the bible," said a girl in the front row, who Langdon understood to be a Theology major.

"Yes, it was adapted for the bible," said Langdon, shedding the urge to check his watch again. "And you have no doubt heard the oldest story to man kind, the Epic of Gilgamesh.."

"Giga-who?" asked the same girl. "I've never heard of him."

"Yes, you have," said Langdon. "Maybe you have heard of him referred to as Noah."

"Noah's Ark?" asked a boy in the back.

"Would anybody care to share the story?" asked Langdon. The same girl in the front raised her hand. Robert pointed to her.

"Well, the Lord wanted to change what man had become so he decided to flood the earth. He asked Noah to create the ark so that he and his family could survive the flood. He also asked that he bring two of every creature, male and female, onto the ark. And it rained for forty days and forty nights, and-"

Robert raised his hand. "That's enough, I think we get the gist of the story." He glanced down at his watch again, 2:44. "The Epic of Gilgamesh is quite similar to the story. It is, in fact, where the story of Noah derived from. In Ancient Mesopotamia the Sumerians view on life was that the way they lived on earth would be their heaven, because once their time ended, they would be sent to the underworld, where they believed to be a miserable place.

"Just like in Egypt, they had the annual flooding of the rivers, and it would cause huge destruction upon the people who lived nearby, and this was the source of death for most people. But of course, they had to live there, because that was their source for life. So it was a lose-lose situation, either way you look at it. Well, there was a man named Gilgamesh who thought he would defy the gods by showing he could survive the great floods. So he built a boat and gathered his family, and he survived. Believing that he defied the gods. But, we all know, that eventually, man must die, and so did he, while he did defy the gods on that stage, he couldn't live the eternal life that he wished for."

"But Noah didn't want to defy God," said the girl. "God chose him to be the survivor, and-"

"That is what the bible says," said Langdon. "But the bible has been written and rewritten many of times. During the middle ages, monks used to sit in churches all day copying the bible, over and over again. Mistakes are made. And not to mention the countless other things that the have happened to take information from-"

"You're wrong," the girl said. "The bible is the word of the Lord. This "Epic of Gilgamesh" is just someone else's interpretation of it."

"But it is not, because there was no one to interpret it, because it was the first. Gilgamesh was the first literature character ever to be known to man."

"But-."

The bell rang. Langdon couldn't have timed it more perfectly. As students began to file out of the classroom, the girl whom had rejected the idea of Gilgamesh gave him a menacing look, and he heard her utter the words; "dropping this class". He gave her a smile as she walked past him, and she looked away.

As the last person filed out of the room, Langdon grabbed his brief case and checked his watch, yet again. 3:02, it read. He had a 28 minutes to catch his plane at Logan International Airport.