Between Two Rivers

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.

In Between Two Rivers, historian Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid reveals the breathtakingly intimate, raw and relatable moments they left behind, like a dog’s paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, or the adorable, messy writing of preschoolers. We brush hands with an enslaved person negotiating their freedom, an astronomer tracing the movement of the planets, and a working mother struggling with ‘the juggle’ in 1900 BCE.

Together, these fragments illuminate not just the history of Mesopotamia, but the story of how history was made.

Author Biography

Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wolfson College, where she specialises in the languages and history of ancient Mesopotamia. She completed her BA from Columbia University in Philosophy, and after a single day of learning about cuneiform texts at a summer school, decided to pursue the subject with a Master’s degree and eventually a Doctoral degree at the University of Oxford. She is from Saudi Arabia, where she also grew up, and now lives in Oxfordshire with her family.