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Near where the Tigris River meets the Euphrates, in what has been called "the cradle of civilization," there was once a great and powerful ruler named Gilgamesh, or so we are told by the famous epic that bears his name. This Gilgamesh quested first for a soulmate and then for the meaning of life. Were people created, he demanded of his gods, only to suffer and die? That Gilgamesh's existential pain was scratched from reeds into clay almost 4000 years ago -- a millennium before Homer's songs were set down in writing -- testifies to the advanced culture of the ancient Sumerians.

The Sumerians, it is said, transformed parched earth into lush fields of barley and groves of date-palms. They turned the pottery wheel on its side and thereby revoluntionized transportation forever. Wagons full of their goods rolled across new trade routes to northern Turkey, the Himalayas, and sourthern Egypt and brought back riches that helped Sumerian villages grow into vast city-states. To keep an accurate record of their complex foreign barter, Sumerian scribes used reeds to draw wedgeshaped marks on clay tablets. In so doing, they invented "cuneiform" -- Latin for wedgeshaped -- the world's first elaborate system of writing. With such a tool, the Sumerians produced a deep body of literature, much of which has been discovered and deciphered only in the past century.

When scholars unearthed the Sumerian story of creation in the lost city of Ninevah, they puzzled over its parallels to and departures from the Biblical account. In the Sumerian cosmology, Enlil the air-god wrought heaven and earth out of primeval water, and the pantheon of gods and goddesses breathed life into human forms created out of clay. There was an Edenic garden called "Dilmun," which possessed not one forbidden fruit, but eight, and was further distinguished by "spikey bushes blossoming with gemstones." Meanwhile, the Epic of Gilgamesh describes a deluge of Biblical propportions and features a Noah-like character called Utnapishtim who builds a life-saving ark. Actually, Genesis records the story of the most well-known Sumerian of all, a shepherd named Abraham whose unshakable faith in one God changed the history of civilization.

In, Ur, the town of Abraham's birth, there have surfaced many artifacts, which are like pieces of a giant puzzle: Queen Puabi's tomb represents the earliest evidence of magnificent artwork and the "Standard of Ur" is a particularly dazzling, bejeweled mosaic that depicts daily life in Sumeria. Inspired by these finds and by the story of this ancient people, American designer Angie Olami has designed the Gilgamesh Collection. Made from sterling silver, it combines cuneiform writing, gems like those imagined to grow in the Sumerian "Dilmun," and touchstones of Sumerian civilization.

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