'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 HOLLAND 'Tender moving and vivid.'
ROBERT MACFARLANE 'Beautiful' 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 ---------- 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 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.
