Between Two Rivers

<p><b>'I have never read a book on Mesopotamia that so beautifully brings to life the people themselves ... It melts away the sense of time.'<Br>TOM HOLLAND</b></p><p><b>'Tender, moving and vivid.'<Br>ROBERT MACFARLANE<Br></b><Br><b>'Beautiful'<Br>STEPHEN GREENBLATT</b></p><p><b>'Fascinating and magnificent, beautifully written and explained: this book is a masterpiece.'<Br>GEORGE MONBIOT<Br></b><Br><b>'Ancient Mesopotamia comes alive in Moudhy Al-Rashid's must-read, millennia-spanning history ... spellbinding'<Br><i>NEW SCIENTIST</p><p></i></b> ----------</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>In <i>Between Two Rivers</i>, 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.</p><p>Together, these fragments illuminate not just the history of Mesopotamia, but the story of how history was made.</p>