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
- Title: Between Two Rivers
- Author: Moudhy Al-Rashid
- Genre: Non-fiction
- Publisher: WW Norton
- Pages: 336
During his campaign in Egypt at the turn of the 19th century, Napoleon told his soldiers that “from the summit of these pyramids, 40 centuries look down upon you.” It’s 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’s anything left to look down from?
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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’s 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.
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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, “among other things, some overzealous Amazon packaging, the discarded top of a yoghurt pot, and an empty packet of dog treats.”
From that, they would draw conclusions about her life, she writes, including the inference that she “worshipped a deity called ‘Amazon’ whose iconography included a faceless smile capped by an arrow at one end.” 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.
Students doodled on clay tablets during lessons just as we do on paper and iPads.Hisham F. Ibrahim/Getty Images
Al-Rashid’s history of one of the cradles of civilization, built around a tour of an ancient “museum” found in the 2,500-year-old excavated palace of Princess Ennigaldi-Nanna, is clever and readable. It’s a history of Mesopotamia told through objects including a statue, cuneiform tablets and a mace head.
As a history, it’s at once narrow and personal – peppered with references to the author’s life – and sweeping and general – 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.
Cuneiform writing and the tablets on which Mesopotamians wrote are central to Al-Rashid’s 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.
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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.
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.
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 – 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.
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.
“Climate breakdown,” she writes of our own time, “precipitated by an exponential, human-driven increase in carbon emissions, have already forced many to relocate.” We are almost surely to see our own collapses. We’re already seeing relocations.
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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’re all just trying to sort out ourselves and our pasts, and always have been.
Between Two Rivers is as much a people’s 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.
The book is comprehensive without being overburdened by the weight of details that comprise such a critical – and long – 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 – not as an abstract narrator teaching us history, but as a human processing and sharing it – 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 – and stories.
