Between Two Rivers

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 that once lay between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, preserves leaps in human ingenuity, like the first depiction of a wheel and the first approximation of pi. But they also capture breathtakingly intimate moments, raw and relatable, like the paw prints a dog left when 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 our 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 handwriting of preschoolers. We meet an enslaved person negotiating his freedom, an astronomer charting the motion 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 only the history of Mesopotamia, but the story of how history was made.