Between Two Rivers
Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History
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One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2025
Humanity’s earliest efforts at recording and drawing meaning from history reveal how lives millennia ago were not so different from our own.
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.
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Assyriologist Al-Rashid debuts with an eclectic history of Mesopotamia framed around an ancient collection of artifacts widely considered to be the first museum. Located in a room in a palace in Ur that was excavated in the 1920s, the artifacts were collected by princess Ennigaldi-Nanna in the sixth century BCE; among them were objects dating back to the 21st century BCE. Al-Rashid uses items from the collection as springboards to discuss Mesopotamian history: a statue of King Shulgi leads to an examination of the rise of kings; a cone dedicating a temple to the moon god parlays into an analysis of how astronomy led to the birth of science. The author movingly uses the collection's written tablets to explore the constancy of human emotions and concerns—a woman begs to be allowed to die following a miscarriage, students doodle in the margins of their practice tablets, a Kassite king implores the Egyptian pharaoh to send a beautiful woman for a diplomatic marriage. Ruminating on how the study of history was made possible by the advent of writing, Al-Rashid also pinpoints ways in which the written word perhaps muddles the past more than documents it (examples include the scant archaeological evidence for the many brutal wars depicted in ancient Mesopotamian annals). The result is a nuanced meditation on how history gets made.
