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REVIEW BY TIMOTHY MATNEY
The academic world inhabited by Sumerologists and Assyriologists is highly specialised and largely inaccessible for even the hardiest lovers of history. The texts themselves are fragmentary, often pieced together from disparate copies, deliberately anachronistic, and range from mundane inventories of storeroom contents to propagandistic retellings of battles, from obscure magical formulae for midwives to letters complaining that one’s spouse failed to get full value in selling the family’s cloth.
Somehow, from such opaque source material, Moudhy al-Rashid provides a wide-ranging and compelling narrative that breathes life into these historical scraps from ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Between Two Rivers takes as a starting point a set of artefacts, excavated a century ago by the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley from a 6th-century BC palace of Princess Ennigaldi-Nanna at the ancient city of Ur, that may, or may not, represent exhibits from the world’s earliest known museum.
A clay drum, an inscribed brick, a statue, clay tablets written by scribal students, an inscribed cone, a boundary stone, and a mace-head each introduce a different time period of Mesopotamian history and a discussion of various aspects of ancient life. For example, the chapter highlighting the mace-head leads the reader through a history of warfare in ancient Mesopotamia, the symbolism of maces, border conflicts in the Early Dynastic period, the nature of kingship, royal propaganda, the Second Gulf War, and Neo-Assyrian imperial expansion.
This is not a strictly ordered chronological history. The narrative moves fluidly between time periods as al-Rashid helps the reader grapple with the idea of ‘long history’ – a civilisation that stretches not just over centuries, but across four millennia. Throughout the book, she examines the use of myth and legend to create history, the relationship between language and history, and the limitations of oral tradition in a largely non-literate world. Al-Rashid is not just telling an ancient history, but the history of history-making.
Between Two Rivers is written in an engaging style and it is immediately clear to the reader that much of this narrative is personal for al-Rashid. For example, she relates how, on her first day of teaching at university, she found comfort from, and empathy for, the ancient scribal students whose clumsy cuneiform copies she translated. While this is not a technical work or textbook, al-Rashid provides notes for the reader so they can find the artefacts themselves, as well as extensive footnotes to guide further reading on the individual topics.
A larger question emerging from al-Rashid’s book is whether this kind of retelling of Sumerian and Akkadian texts is necessary to maintain their relevance in today’s world outside academia. For example, her juxtaposition of the Gilgamesh and the modern science fiction of Star Trek was at first jarring, at least to this reader, but ultimately important for reminding us of shared human experiences and concerns, and building an appreciation of the depth of cultural understanding preserved in the cuneiform tablets of the first literate civilisation.
Between Two Rivers: ancient Mesopotamia and the birth of history
Moudhy al-Rashid
Hodder & Stoughton, £25
ISBN 978-1529392128
