Autorentext

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 is from Saudi Arabia, where she also grew up, and now lives in Oxfordshire with her family.

Klappentext

'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
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'Beautiful'
STEPHEN GREENBLATT

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