Between Two Rivers

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.

Fascinating and magnificent, beautifully written and explained: this book is a masterpiece. -- GEORGE MONBIOT, author of Feral and The Invisible Doctrine
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. -- James Barr, author of A LINE IN THE SAND

Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid is a Fellow at the University of Oxford's Wolfson College, where she specialises in the languages and history of ancient Mesopotamia. After a single day of learning about cuneiform texts at a summer school, she decided to abandon her law school ambitions to dedicate her career to this ancient history. She has written for academic and popular journals, including History Today, and appeared on several podcasts, including Making History and You're Dead to Me. Through her social media accounts, she hopes to give ancient Mesopotamia as wide an audience as possible and to humanise its long history. Originally from Saudi Arabia, she now lives near Oxford with her family and their dogs.

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