{"product_id":"9781324134589","title":"Between Two Rivers","description":"\u003cb\u003eOne of \u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e's Best Books of 2025\u003cbr\u003e\r\n\u003cbr\u003e\r\n“Breathes life into the dry clay of philology.” —Dominic Green, \u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\r\n\u003cbr\u003e\r\nHumanity’s earliest efforts at recording and drawing meaning from history reveal how lives millennia ago were not so different from our own.\r\n\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThousands of years ago, in a part of the world we now call ancient Mesopotamia, people began writing things down for the very first time.\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eWhat 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eBetween Two Rivers\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003eMillennia 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n","brand":"Moudhy Al-Rashid","offers":[{"title":"Paperback \/ softback Trade paperback (US)","offer_id":48243507429428,"sku":"9781324134589","price":26.99,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0635\/0320\/4404\/files\/BNCImageAPI_8ba788ce-ceeb-419e-9423-3398de32e9ed.jpg?v=1787850431","url":"https:\/\/wanderingalbatrossbooks.com\/products\/9781324134589","provider":"Wandering Albatross Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}