W. W. Norton & Company
Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History
Couldn't load pickup availability
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 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.
Millennia ago, Mesopotamians saw the world's first cities, the first writing system, early seeds of agriculture, and groundbreaking developments in medicine and astronomy. With breathtaking intimacy and grace, Al-Rashid brings their lives--with all their anxieties, aspirations, and intimacies--vividly close to our own.
Share
Book Details
ISBN:
9781324036425
EAN:
9781324036425
Binding:
Hardcover
Pages:
336
Authors:
Moudhy Al-Rashid
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Published Date: 2025-12-08
View full details
I loved Dr. Al-Rashid’s conversational style throughout this book! There’d be paragraphs of historical information then a joke. (My favorite was her suggestion that a “male-dominated pantheon” of gods be called a mantheon.)The book told stories of various historical figures, connecting them across the centuries. And not just stories of royalty but stories of all walks of life.(I paired the end of the book with the audiobook, which is narrated by Dr. Al-Rashid herself, and it is excellent! Her passion for the subject comes across clearly.)Thank you to NetGalley and W. W. Norton & Company for an eARC of this book! This is my honest review.
The author does a very good job describing the archaeological significance of dozens of artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia, from the 34th century BCE to the 6th century BCE.Inexcusably, however, there isn't a photo (or even a drawing) of ANY of the items she describes. And nowhere in the book is there an apology for their absence (or even an acknowledgement of it).For a book that describes archaeological artifacts to be published for general audiences in 2025 with no photos is a publishing error. My condolences to the author!(Additional note to the publisher: All the text on Page 251 is blurred.)
I don't often leave reviews, but I feel the need to offer some proportion to this overly hyped book. I have read thousands of books and a great deal on this topic. It is not bad. But I don't know what it is today where authors of academic subjects feel the need to write pseudo-memoirs and insert themselves into everything. Do I really need to know about the author's love for dogs, former desire to be an attorney, the goodnight song she sings to her child, etc.? I really think this represents the state of publishing today, as I have read books on string theory that have done similar turns, especially when that scholar is a woman. Sometimes it works and makes sense, but other times, in this case especially, what is the point? My impression is that everybody today is looking for a platform and somehow the more "relatable" you are the better -- so make yourself relatable. For me, it just is annoying and makes me wonder about the commitment of the writer, a suspicion not quelled by what feels to be overly exaggerated enthusiasm for things that feel quite trivial. It also annoys me that this book is peppered with blurbs by relatively well known academics and writers who, I now wonder, have even read the book. I imagine a lot of readers will like this sort of thing and maybe this will introduce them to an interesting field that is much more worth while than being an attorney, but this book feels horribly manufactured by a publishing industry looking for the "full package" and really lacks the sort of depth and rigor I was hoping for. Nothing really new here and not up to the standard of, say, How the World Made the West, but if you're looking for a lite beach read about Mesopotamia that covers the basics, here you go.
I really looked forward this as I love ancient history. However, I listened to the audiobook version which the author elected to read herself and did a terrible job. She read it much too fast - I even had to use the settings in my app to slow her down - and her rendition was difficult to listen to and boring. I probably would have enjoyed this much more if I had read it. I don't know if authors do this to save money or just insist on doing it themselves, but just having finished a professionally narrated audiobook in which the reader was outstanding, it really makes a big difference.
Big thanks to publisher for the ARC!Own voices history, always going to be my favorite. Also written by a woman, I was in the second I saw it! Al-Rashid not only chooses an interesting way to frame her work, by using objects discovered in a "museum" in Mesopotamia, but her personal connection to Mesopotamian history gives her a interesting connection to the topic that makes her writing and perspective unique to read.At times, it does feel like the same point is being repeated multiple times per paragraph/chapter. However, I was interested enough and enjoying the work enough for it to not bother me too much.Would highly recommend for anyone interested in Mesopotamian history, or ancient history in general!
