Description
By (author) Moudhy Al-Rashid
Short /annotation:
A fresh and spellbinding new history of ancient Mesopotamia.
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”I have never read a book on Mesopotamia that so beautifully brings to life the people themselves … It melts away the sense of time.”
TOM HOLLAND
”Tender, moving and vivid.”
ROBERT MACFARLANE
”Beautiful”
STEPHEN GREENBLATT
”Fascinating and magnificent, beautifully written and explained: this book is a masterpiece.”
GEORGE MONBIOT
”Ancient Mesopotamia comes alive in Moudhy Al-Rashid”s must-read, millennia-spanning history … spellbinding”
NEW SCIENTIST
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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.
Review quote:
Fascinating and magnificent, beautifully written and explained: this book is a masterpiece.
Review quote:
I have never read a book on Mesopotamia that so beautifully brings to life the people themselves. There are beautiful s of what it is to be pregnant, to give birth, to have small children, to love a dog. I love the way in which she”s not just writing about priests or kings, but is giving us a clay tablet on which a little child has bitten, so you have the imprint of his teeth.
It melts away the sense of time. A wonderful read.
Review quote:
A
tender, moving and vivid history of ancient Mesopotamia and how it still speaks to us.
Review quote:
Ancient Mesopotamia comes alive in Moudhy Al-Rashid”s
must-read, millennia-spanning history, cleverly wrought from tablets written in the world”s oldest script …
spellbinding …
a fresh and very human portrait of the region… Through her clever sifting of the texts, we see how cuneiform … helped to bind these civilisations together across millennia… We also discover, in Al-Rashid”s vivid rendering of the texts, very moving details from the lives of real people in Mesopotamia over the ages … Al-Rashid”s academic background gives her a wonderful confidence as she roves around the literary and archaeological evidence.
She is also a gifted storyteller, able to spin a yarn of gold from the very fragmentary sources … This is
a delightful book, and a must-read for anyone interested in these civilisations. I hope it serves to shine a larger spotlight on this extraordinary period in humanity”s past.
Review quote:
Beautiful …Moudhy Al-Rashid manages to combine insightful scholarship with a warm personal presence. The world it explores is fascinating and crucially important.
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A marvellous book
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