Alexandre Telishchev-Ferrier, a young French archaeologist, devotes his life to the search for the ancient Sumerian city of Mede, destroyed by a flood around the 4th millennium BC. e. Simultaneously with the excavations, the hero writes a book based on the manuscript he deciphered. Two actions unfold in parallel: in Baghdad in 2002–2003, shortly before the invasion of NATO troops, and during the Sumerian civilization. The two worlds exist as if in a mirror image, each with its own story, in which love, friendship, devotion and thirst for profit, lies, and despair are intertwined. As in ancient times, the gods protect their treasures and will stop at nothing - human life is worth too little for them. In the novel, the author very skillfully shows that man is doomed to exist in an ever-decaying, collapsing world; it only seems to us that the world permanent, in fact, it is an unsteady matter that is continuously transformed and built anew. You can’t get used to anything in it, you can only adapt to it in order to try, by hook or by crook, to preserve the memory of what was once a world that was dear to you.