Gilgamesh taming a lion—on a relief taken from the palace of Sargon II in modern-day Khorsabad, Iraq. Pre-Judaism, the Sumerian king Gilgamesh became the subject of an epic poem, the first to struggle with questions of immortality and humanity. When the author discovered that Gilgamesh was also the name for a black box used on drones, the story—and the American military’s ignorance of it—came to symbolize the continuing search, more than 5,000 years later, for security, a search undertaken in lands that the West fundamentally does not understand. (Photograph courtesy of Erich Lessing. “Statue of a hero taming a lion,” Louvre, Département des Antiquités Orientales, Paris, France.)