{"id":135940,"date":"2025-09-14T03:13:22","date_gmt":"2025-09-14T03:13:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/135940\/"},"modified":"2025-09-14T03:13:22","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T03:13:22","slug":"between-two-rivers-takes-us-on-a-tour-of-ancient-refuse-and-relics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/135940\/","title":{"rendered":"Between Two Rivers takes us on a tour of ancient refuse and relics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

University of Oxford honorary fellow Moudhy Al-Rashid imagines what an archaeologist might find a more modest 5,000 years from now in her garbage.MOHAMED EL-SHAHED\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Title:\u00a0Between Two RiversAuthor:\u00a0Moudhy Al-RashidGenre:\u00a0Non-fictionPublisher:\u00a0WW NortonPages:\u00a0336<\/p>\n

During his campaign in Egypt at the turn of the 19th century, Napoleon told<\/a> his soldiers that \u201cfrom the summit of these pyramids, 40 centuries look down upon you.\u201d It\u2019s an extraordinary length of time, tough for us to fathom as we move about our day-to-day lives in chunks of mere minutes and hours. What will look down on humans 40 centuries from now, assuming there\u2019s anything left to look down from? <\/p>\n

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If there are humans and structures to be found on Earth 4,000 years from now, or perhaps on some other planet in or beyond our solar system, it may be that there\u2019s less looking down than digging up. So much of history and our understanding of it is less about the monumental heights of the pyramids or the Colosseum than the depths of digs that teach us about the lives of our forebears by way of their literal trash, which in its own way is both humbling and human.<\/p>\n

Why I joined a German archeological dig on my vacation (and you should too)<\/a><\/p>\n

In Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History, University of Oxford honorary fellow Moudhy Al-Rashid takes us on a tour of ancient refuse and relics, too. She imagines what an archeologist might find a more modest 5,000 years from now in her garbage, \u201camong other things, some overzealous Amazon packaging, the discarded top of a yoghurt pot, and an empty packet of dog treats.\u201d <\/p>\n

From that, they would draw conclusions about her life, she writes, including the inference that she \u201cworshipped a deity called \u2018Amazon\u2019 whose iconography included a faceless smile capped by an arrow at one end.\u201d The line, and the personal touch, was nice, especially since I split my reading of the book between the audiobook, read by the author herself, and a physical copy. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Students doodled on clay tablets during lessons just as we do on paper and iPads.Hisham F. Ibrahim\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Al-Rashid\u2019s history of one of the cradles of civilization, built around a tour of an ancient \u201cmuseum\u201d found in the 2,500-year-old excavated palace of Princess Ennigaldi-Nanna, is clever and readable. It\u2019s a history of Mesopotamia told through objects including a statue, cuneiform tablets and a mace head. <\/p>\n

As a history, it\u2019s at once narrow and personal \u2013\u2060 peppered with references to the author\u2019s life \u2013\u2060 and sweeping and general \u2013\u2060 covering an era in history that witnessed the birth of writing, agriculture and the wheel alongside the rise and fall of empires and of great personages who once dominated polities, many of whom are now forgotten to time and to us. <\/p>\n

Cuneiform writing and the tablets on which Mesopotamians wrote are central to Al-Rashid\u2019s history of the land between two rivers. The tablets, some of which were discarded by their owners, serve as primary sources for so much of what we know about the peoples who made up the cities and empires of the region. <\/p>\n

Death \u2014 and plenty of life \u2014 on a Nile River cruise<\/a><\/p>\n

As she notes, garbage is central to our understanding of this history, such as discarded clay tablets on which students once practised their writing, at once mundane and remarkable, and reminiscent, 20 or more centuries later, of our own educational paths.<\/p>\n

One of the core take-aways from Between Two Rivers is that ancient history matters, which most historians take as a premise, if not an article of faith. Another is that the history of 20 or even 40 centuries past offers stories that parallel our own. <\/p>\n

Students lost focus and doodled on clay tablets during lessons just as we did on paper a few decades ago and as many do on iPads and cellphones today \u2013 and probably paper, too. Officials kept track of exchanges and debts and tax obligations on tablets as we do on spreadsheets and e-mailed invoices. Indeed, writing itself originated to track just that, as much as we might lament it in the present day when our bills come due.<\/p>\n

Not all the historical parallels are mundane. Al-Rashid notes the ancient city of Ur, located in present-day Iraq, collapsed and was abandoned sometime after 500 BCE in part because of environmental changes, particularly a shift in the flow of the Euphrates River and desertification. <\/p>\n

\u201cClimate breakdown,\u201d she writes of our own time, \u201cprecipitated by an exponential, human-driven increase in carbon emissions, have already forced many to relocate.\u201d We are almost surely to see our own collapses. We\u2019re already seeing relocations. <\/p>\n

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More generally, Al-Rashid finds the Ancient Mesopotamians used history as a tool for power and control, as we do now, while exhuming artifacts to make sense of ourselves and our place in time and the cosmos. In short, we\u2019re all just trying to sort out ourselves and our pasts, and always have been. <\/p>\n

Between Two Rivers is as much a people\u2019s history of Mesopotamia as it is a history of objects and great personages and notable events. The objects Al-Rashid studies serve to bring together both the mundane and relatable while placing them in the context of the broader movement of history as a site of the rise and fall of rulers and their polities. <\/p>\n

The book is comprehensive without being overburdened by the weight of details that comprise such a critical \u2013 and long \u2013 period in human history. But what makes it special is a sense of relatability its author manages to weave throughout the text, both to her \u2013\u2060 not as an abstract narrator teaching us history, but as a human processing and sharing it \u2013\u2060 and to the lives and times of the people who existed for a moment and then were gone, leaving us traces of themselves in clay and metal and stone \u2013\u2060 and stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: University of Oxford honorary fellow Moudhy Al-Rashid imagines what an archaeologist might find…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135941,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[457,96,14367,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-135940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-noastack","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135940\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}