Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History

The land between the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, known as Mesopotamia by the Greeks and known as Iraq today, has 5,000 years of history and stories to tell. Tablets, reliefs, ruins, pots, bricks and other material objects tell a very human story about life in the ancient Near East. The Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians left a wealth of culture, art and history behind. Their achievements include being among the earliest civilisations to adopt writing; some of the first to build large cities and infrastructure and to develop science, maths and epics that are still with us today. Yet, approaching the history of the region can be intimidating, especially for those of us not brought up knowing about it. While the ancient history of Mesopotamia might be better known by the general public than some other ancient civilisations in other parts of the world, it is still fairly limited, especially when compared with Mesopotamia’s much younger cousins and rivals of Greece and Rome. Much less is widely known about daily life of the people by the broader public and that is where Moudhy Al-Rashid’s new book, Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History , comes into play.

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Al-Rashid’s fascination with Mesopotamia came about through happenstance. She happened to be in London for a week as part of her layover, heading back to her home in Saudi Arabia after studying philosophy in New York, with plans to go to law school, when she decided to enrol on a short course on books of the ancient world, which would alter the course of her life forever. Her introduction to the script used by the Sumerians and adapted by the Babylonians and Assyrians, cuneiform, set her on a path to unravel the voices of the past. In Between Two Rivers, Al-Rashid tells us that the earliest texts found, which are some of the earliest known writings in the world, are about record keeping. Around 3350 BCE in the city of Uruk, a man believed to be called Kushim, kept written records on clay tablets about his storage facility for ingredients needed for making beer. This was a massive undertaking, ‘This beer provided rations to agricultural workers who harvested products that were stored and redistributed by the temple, which served as the city’s religious and economic centre.’  It might seem strange that writing was invented by administrators rather than by poets or philosophers but, as Al-Rashid reminds us, the scale of production was so vast that ‘administrators needed some kind of memory aid.’

Between Two Rivers is not designed to be a comprehensive sweep of the history of the Sumerians, Babylonians or Assyrians, nor a chronological read of events in these places. In each chapter, the book introduces us to a new material item and tells us the different histories that this item reveals to us. It tells us as much about ordinary daily life as it does about the kings, gods and knowledge in these storied lands. Take bricks, while they serve a direct function as part of a building structure, they also tell archaeologists a great deal about life in the early periods. Bricks are more than mere building material. They contain evidence of beliefs people held and were used in medicine, ‘In an ancient therapy for someone who feels troubled, the patient is instructed to remove a brick from the threshold of his house, and place it in an oven with the implication of burning it.’ Clay tablets also give us an insight into the lives of children; a tablet containing the teeth marks of a pre-teen from Nippur, has preserved his act for millennia, while we do not know why he did it, we do know he was likely in school and studying Hammurabi’s laws.

Between Two Rivers offers readable and relatable glimpses into the ancient past. We learn of kings and tradesmen alike; we hear poems and inventories; we encounter astrology and maths. We meet women, children, men, labourers, scribes, priests, kings and warriors. The book feels like Al-Rashid is taking us all on a personal tour of a display cabinet, in either the British Museum or Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, telling us what stories each object is trying to tell. Through anecdotes of her own life, Al-Rashid also makes the ancient voices seem even more familiar to us, as there is much that brings us together with them. Between Two Rivers is a compelling read and a window into a fascinating history.

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