Between Two Rivers

A parent desperately trying to soothe a baby, a bored teenager doodling during class, a slave negotiating their freedom: snapshots from everyday lives, preserved in clay from ancient Mesopotamia.
At the height of its power, this lush region was encircled by two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Over the course of thousands of years, Mesopotamia saw the world's first cities, the first writing system, the early seeds of agriculture, the development of myths, medicine, literature and astronomy that all went on to influence societies around the world. It is the birthplace of history itself.
In Between Two Rivers, historian Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid brings us closer to the lives of the ancient people from the land between two rivers. Through the clay tablets left behind, Al-Rashid explores the foundations of extraordinary societies and empires, from the Sumerians to the Babylonians. We find, immortalised in clay and stone, early dictionaries, a dog's paw prints, war-time propaganda, the world's first museum and countless receipts for beer. These stories not only bring Mesopotamia to life, but also show us that people we think of as 'ancient' in fact had a highly developed sense of their own history.
With startling modernity, Between Two Rivers tells the story of how history was made.

Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid is a Fellow at the University of Oxford's Wolfson College, where she specialises in the languages and history of ancient Mesopotamia. After a single day of learning about cuneiform texts at a summer school, she decided to abandon her law school ambitions to dedicate her career to this ancient history. She has written for academic and popular journals, including History Today, and appeared on several podcasts, including 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. Originally from Saudi Arabia, she now lives near Oxford with her family and their dogs.