What They Left Behind

''I have never read a book on Mesopotamia that so beautifully brings to life the people themselves ... It melts away the sense of time. A wonderful read.''
TOM HOLLAND

''A tender, moving and vivid history of ancient Mesopotamia and how it still speaks to us.''
ROBERT MACFARLANE

''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

Introduction

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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.