Between Two Rivers

AN ENTHRALLING HISTORY OF ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA, TOLD THROUGH THE STORIES LEFT BEHIND IN CLAY.'I have never read a book on Mesopotamia that so beautifully brings to life the people themselves . . . It melts away the sense of time.' - TOM HOLLANDThousands 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 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 illuminate not just the history of Mesopotamia, but the story of how history was made. ----'Tender, moving and vivid.' - ROBERT MACFARLANE'Beautiful . . . The world it explores is fascinating and crucially important.' - STEPHEN GREENBLATT'Fascinating and magnificent, beautifully written and explained: this book is a masterpiece.' - GEORGE MONBIOT'Ancient Mesopotamia comes alive in Moudhy Al-Rashid's must-read, millennia-spanning history . . . spellbinding.' - NEW SCIENTIST 'An ingenious, passionate "history of histories".' - 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