REVIEW: Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid
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.
Dear Dr. Al-Rashid,
Recently I read and enjoyed “The Mesopotamian Riddle” which discussed the men who deciphered cuneiform writing which unlocked first hand recordings of life in the ancient Mesopotamian region. I saw this book on offer and decided to keep going in my quest to learn more about one of the cradles of civilization – one that gave humanity so many of its major milestone “firsts” such as writing, cities, some of the first large scale agriculture, and the wheel.
It felt intimate to cradle that tablet in my palm, like I was touching the unknown, early scribe who also once held the wet clay while tracing pictures of boots and bulls into it.
Non-fiction books can either dazzle me with new knowledge or bore me. This book knocks it out of the ballpark. It’s knowledgeable, passionate, and readable. It’s also relatable. The people who lived in this area 5000 years ago were different from us yet also very much the same. That is the main thing that I take away from reading “Between Two Rivers.” I could meet those people on the street and understand them as human beings. Yes, they invented writing (unless Vinca, which has not been deciphered, is a language) and also, maybe had the first museum.
Whoever brought together those diverse artefacts from disparate eras had a sense of and respect for the great age of of those objects.
The layout of the book follows a collection of items from the palace of a Babylonian princess, who was also the dedicated high priestess of the moon god, which span millennia but which were found together. The archeologist who discovered them described the find as a “museum” as the items varied wildly in age and purpose but, and here’s the good part, also there was a cylinder seal that, much like a tag in a museum, seems to describe a (now missing) item. Through the discussion of these items, Mesopotamian writing, building materials, kings, schools, science, everyday people, war, and the place of women are covered.
From the stories and snapshots left behind in clay, we know that these ancient people were not so different from any of us.
Rather than being a dry run-down of all these things, these people feel immediate to me. Cuneiform writing probably began as a way to keep track of beer rations owed to workers but soon expanded to cover complaints about a guy trying to duck his brick making work requirements. There’s always a slacker, right? But there’s also a lullaby to be sung to a baby in the middle of the night, a tablet from a school that a bored student bit into and doodles that might be aimed at the teacher, and a wife writing to her absent trader husband reminding him not to sell her textiles for less than market value. There is even proof that ancient Sumerians believed in ghosts.
Little one who dwelled in darkness, now you’ve come and seen the sun. Why the crying? Why the worries? What has made your peace undone?
The first book was begun here and eventually compiled into the Epic of Gilgamesh. The idea of kingship might have been born between the two rivers. There are records of diplomatic relations with the pharaohs of Egypt and of a woman trying to buy her children out of slavery. The death of Alexander the Great is recorded as well as an exasperated princess ordering her sister-in-law to do her homework. Due to accidents of preservation, we know slices of some of these lives and surprisingly much about others like a female physician who is mentioned in dozens of cuneiform tablets. Much like now, school tablets survive with a teacher’s neat writing beside the messy attempts of fledgling scribes. And these poor kids also had to do maths word problems.
The past may be a foreign country, but these moments don’t feel far away. They don’t feel like they belong to strangers.
The fertile lands between the rivers allowed for increased food production which caused increased populations and cities. Trade flourished, wars were fought over territorial boundaries, princesses were married in strategic alliances, pottery styles were invented and changed, kings recorded their victories and (hopefully exaggerated) treatment of captives, and some guy tried to have goods smuggled into a city – in smugglers’ underwear – to avoid paying his taxes. There are bricks from the city of Ur that have dog paw prints alongside the stamp of the king while the Sumerian King List mentions a female bartender turned queen. Kings then, as do rulers now, had “puff pieces” written about them to show how they wanted to be remembered.
Sumerian proverbs give sweet glimpses into the way people interacted with and relied on their canine companions, such as ‘The dog understands, “Take it!” It does not understand, “Put it down!”’; and ‘A dog which is played with turns into a puppy.’
So though we are separated from them by (in some cases) over 5,000 years, these are people just like us. They lived, they loved, they cheated on their taxes, sang to their babies, whinged about a day’s work, and loved their dogs. Check out this book and meet them. A
~Jayne
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This is one of those books that sound interesting, but I doubt I’d actually get around to reading it, so I appreciate your review for a little slice of the larger picture. Thank you.
@Kris Bock: I’m increasingly realizing that there are a lot of books out there that fit your description and, when I am reading blurbs, I am trying to think very hard about “will I actually read this or is it something I can read a Wikipedia article about?” Sucks to be getting older with less “I’ll get to it someday” days left.
This book sounds marvellous. I have always wanted to know more about this cradle of civilization and wondered why it has gotten so much less attention than its fellow cradle at the mouth of the Nile. And the writing you quoted is lovely.
Does he talk at all about how this part of the world came to be so advanced? I recall learning in school that the fertile land between the rivers made it easier to farm and thus freed up people’s time enough that they could imagine and investigate more. Is that still the prevalent theory?
BTW, Jayne, have you read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind? If not I think you would really like it. The author covers the Sumerians and Babylonians a bit among other interesting things like marsupial lions and how wheat domesticated people (not the other way around).
@Janine: Actually Dr. Al-Rashid is a woman who managed a toddler and a baby while writing the book. The lullaby spoke to her. ☺ She talks about how she had thought to go into law until, on a whim, she took a week long class about cuneiform and by the end of the week, had dumped all thoughts of going to law school.
Maybe the lack of attention is due to the writing having been cracked decades later than Egyptian hieroglyphs or because the glories of Mesopotamian cities were mostly buried by sand while the pyramids were right there, in your face. There are apparently thousands and thousands of cuneiform clay tablets awaiting translation but not enough Assyriologists yet to get to them all.
That is the thought – that fertile land yielded more crops that first required a way to manage all the produce and then allowed more time for everything else. She mentioned that writing probably developed to allow managers to keep track of crop yields and the rations owed to municipal workers.
I haven’t read Sapiens but I need to.
@Janine: I’m also slowly listening to “Ancient Mesopotamia” in the Great Courses series. Slowly not because it’s not fascinating but because my library only allows 3 “borrows” from Hoopla each month.
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