Between Two Rivers
Moudhy Al-Rashid (UK, 20 February); (US, 12 August))
A new and spellbinding book tells the history of the very ancient past of Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Between Two Rivers by Moudhy Al-Rashid, a researcher at the University of Oxford, weaves together the many strands of the story of the region, which covers much of what is now Iraq.
Ancient Mesopotamia has languished in obscurity, at least compared with the better-known Greek, Roman and Egyptian civilisations. So many world firsts, including the development of writing and literature, the invention of the wheel and scientific study, can be credited to it. And yet most would struggle to point to the region on a map.
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One problem is that children aren鈥檛 routinely taught about it at school. The sheer number of names of the area鈥檚 various civilisations 鈥� Sumer, Akkadia, Assyria, Babylonia 鈥� can also serve to confuse. For security reasons, the sights of ancient Mesopotamia aren鈥檛 on many tourists鈥� itineraries, and even if they were, there is nothing so well-preserved as the Colosseum or Acropolis to be found.
What the region does have, though, is thousands of clay tablets, which have survived since antiquity. They may not glitter like gold, but they are covered in the most ancient writing system known to humankind, cuneiform, and they provide an astonishing amount of information about the dawn of the modern world.
In this new history, Al-Rashid takes full advantage of this to paint a fresh and very human portrait of the region. She shows how successive civilisations looked back on the history of these lands and used it for their own gain, with deep links to the past lending credibility to their institutions.
Cuneiform script helped bind the civilisations of Mesopotamia together across millennia
Through her clever sifting of the texts, we see how cuneiform, and the formal languages associated with it, Sumerian and Akkadian, helped to bind these civilisations together across millennia. We see how official roles, for example the job of a high priestess to the god of the moon in Ur, persisted for thousands of years, and how, across civilisations, the duties of a king remained astonishingly constant.
We also discover, in Al-Rashid鈥檚 vivid rendering of the texts, very moving details from the lives of real people in Mesopotamia over the ages. There is the couple forced to sell their children, and 鈥� mirroring that 鈥� a freed slave who goes to court in a bid to have her children join her in freedom. We are also furnished with details of everyday life for city schoolchildren and princesses alike.
We learn about midwifery, the struggles of merchant traders, the origins of the scientific method and also the use of war and propaganda to keep the powerful in power.
Al-Rashid鈥檚 academic background gives her a wonderful confidence as she roves around the literary and archaeological evidence. She is also a gifted storyteller, able to spin a yarn of gold from the very fragmentary sources available.
In one of my favourite passages in the book, Al-Rashid records the last time we know of cuneiform being used in ancient times. I had known that the writing system was still in use until about the time of Christ, but Al-Rashid is more specific than that.
In about 80 BC, an astronomer wrote down the cuneiform sign for 鈥渒ing鈥�, and that is the last evidence we have for the script being used until it was decoded again in the 1850s. How utterly extraordinary, that a writing system that bound kings and queens across 3000 years would end (so far as we know) in that way.
This is a delightful book, and a must-read for anyone interested in these civilisations. I hope it serves to shine a larger spotlight on this extraordinary period in humanity鈥檚 past.
Emily H. Wilson is the author of聽Inanna聽and Gilgamesh, two novels聽set聽in ancient Mesopotamia. The third聽in the series, Ninshubar, will聽be聽published on 5 August
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