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.
