Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (Hardback) - Moudhy Al-Rashid

A fresh and fascinating new history of ancient Mesopotamia and the birth of history.

SELECTED BY THE OBSERVER AS A TOP 2025 'BOOOK TO LOOK FORWARD TO'

'Fascinating and magnificent, beautifully written and explained: this book is a masterpiece' GEORGE MONBIOT

'Wonderfully vivid' LITERARY REVIEW

'An extraordinary invitation to the magical land of Mesopotamia . . . stunning' PROFESSOR SARAH PARCAK

'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' JAMES BARR

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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.

About the Author

Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Oxford's Wolfson College, where she specialises in the languages and history of ancient Mesopotamia. She completed her BA from Columbia University in Philosophy, and after a single day of learning about cuneiform texts at a summer school, decided to pursue the subject with a Master's degree and eventually a Doctoral degree at the University of Oxford.

She has written for academic and popular journals, including History Today, on topics as diverse as mental illness in ancient Mesopotamia to Late Assyrian scholarly networks. In addition to her writing, she has also appeared on several podcasts, including the BBC podcasts 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. She is from Saudi Arabia, where she also grew up, and now lives in Oxfordshire with her family.