Between Two Rivers
On sale
20th February 2025
Price: £25
‘Fascinating and magnificent, beautifully written and explained: this book is a masterpiece.’
GEORGE MONBIOT
‘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. Fart jokes to exam stress, motherhood and tax evasion: you’ll find something here that reminds you that this ancient history is not as remote as you might think.’
JAMES BARR
In ancient times, the vast area that stretches across what is now modern-day Iraq and Syria saw the rise and fall of epic civilizations who built the foundations of our world today. It was in this region, which we call Mesopotamia, that history was written down for the very first time.
With startling modernity, the people of Mesopotamia left behind hundreds of thousands of fragments of their everyday lives. Immortalised in clay and stone are intimate details from 4000 years ago. We find accounts of an enslaved person negotiating their freedom, a dog’s paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, a parent desperately trying to soothe a baby with a lullaby, the imprint of a child’s teeth as it sank them into their clay homework, and countless receipts for beer.
In Between Two Rivers, historian Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid examines what these people chose to preserve in their own words about their lives, creating the first historical records and allowing us to brush hands with them thousands of years later.
Bringing us closer than ever before to the lives of ancient people, Between Two Rivers tells not just the history of Mesopotamia, but the story of how history was made.
GEORGE MONBIOT
‘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. Fart jokes to exam stress, motherhood and tax evasion: you’ll find something here that reminds you that this ancient history is not as remote as you might think.’
JAMES BARR
In ancient times, the vast area that stretches across what is now modern-day Iraq and Syria saw the rise and fall of epic civilizations who built the foundations of our world today. It was in this region, which we call Mesopotamia, that history was written down for the very first time.
With startling modernity, the people of Mesopotamia left behind hundreds of thousands of fragments of their everyday lives. Immortalised in clay and stone are intimate details from 4000 years ago. We find accounts of an enslaved person negotiating their freedom, a dog’s paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, a parent desperately trying to soothe a baby with a lullaby, the imprint of a child’s teeth as it sank them into their clay homework, and countless receipts for beer.
In Between Two Rivers, historian Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid examines what these people chose to preserve in their own words about their lives, creating the first historical records and allowing us to brush hands with them thousands of years later.
Bringing us closer than ever before to the lives of ancient people, Between Two Rivers tells not just the history of Mesopotamia, but the story of how history was made.
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Reviews
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. Fart jokes to exam stress, motherhood and tax evasion: you'll find something here that reminds you that this ancient history is not as remote as you might think. Al Rashid describes her job of reading ancient Mesopotamian texts as like shaking hands with strangers.
Fascinating and magnificent, beautifully written and explained: this book is a masterpiece.
Absorbing, learned and witty, Between Two Rivers is far more than an account of ancient Mesopotamia. Al-Rashid offers an ingenious, passionate 'history of histories', spinning outwards from relics collected by a royal priestess more than 2,500 years ago. In discovering familiar human joys and sorrows - surviving in times of peace and war, dealing with royal and divine demands, the desperate love for our children - we vividly witness how lives across the millennia are revealed and connected by archaeology and cuneiform.