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 dogs paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, or the imprint of a childs 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 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 worlds first museum, and a working mother struggling with the juggle in 1900 BCE.
Millennia ago, Mesopotamians saw the worlds first cities, the first writing system, early seeds of agriculture, and groundbreaking developments in medicine and astronomy. With breathtaking intimacy and grace, Al-Rashid brings their liveswith all their anxieties, aspirations, and intimaciesvividly close to our own.
