Between Two Rivers

A fresh and fascinating new history of ancient Mesopotamia and the birth of history.

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'Fascinating and magnificent, beautifully written and explained: this book is a masterpiece.'
GEORGE MONBIOT

'Absorbing, learned and witty'
REBECCA WRAGG SYKES

'A marvellous book, which not only brims with humanity but offers fascinating and often funny insights into everyday life in this crucial era of world history.'
JAMES BARR

Thousands of years ago, in a part of the world we now call ancient Mesopotamia, people began writing things down for the very first time.

What they left behind, in a vast region that once sat between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, preserves leaps in human ingenuity, like the earliest depiction of a wheel and the first approximation of pi. But they also capture breathtakingly intimate, raw and relatable moments, like a dog's paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, or the imprint of a child's teeth.

In Between Two Rivers, historian Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid reveals what these ancient people chose to record about their lives, allowing us to brush hands with them millennia later. We find a lullaby to soothe a baby, instructions for exorcising a ghost, countless receipts for beer, and the adorable, messy writing of preschoolers. We meet an enslaved person negotiating their freedom, an astronomer tracing the movement of the planets, a princess who may have created the world's first museum, and a working mother struggling with 'the juggle' in 1900 BCE.

Together, these fragments show us how much we share with people who lived many thousands of years ago - people who had already begun to relate to their own past, illuminating not just the history of Mesopotamia, but the story of how history was made.