W.W. Norton Co. has published a new book about the beginnings of Western civilization. It’s titled Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia And the Birth of History and was authored by Moudhy Al-Rashid. And why should you care? Until relatively recent times, religion, science and magick were inextricably intertwined in the minds of the educated, unlettered, rich, poor etc. Science described how things, work, religion explained why it worked that way, and magick gave people a means of having some control over how things turned out. But, starting in the 1500’s, science divorced itself from magick and eventually organized religion went from demonizing thaumaturgy to dismissing it as illusory. So as we learn to reintegrate the three, looking back at times when they functioned as a harmonious trinity can be illustrative. Here’s the posted description of this book:
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.
What they left behind, in a vast region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, preserves leaps in human ingenuity, like the earliest depiction of a wheel and the first approximation of pi. But they also capture breathtakingly intimate, raw, and relatable moments, like a dog’s paw prints as it accidentally stepped into fresh clay, or the imprint of a child’s teeth.
In Between Two Rivers, historian Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid reveals what these ancient people chose to record about their lives, allowing us to brush hands with them millennia later. We find a lullaby to soothe a baby, instructions for exorcising a ghost, countless receipts for beer, and the messy writing of preschoolers. We meet an enslaved person negotiating their freedom, an astronomer tracing the movement of the planets, a princess who may have created the world’s first museum, and a working mother struggling with “the juggle” in 1900 BCE.
Millennia ago, Mesopotamians saw the world’s first cities, the first writing system, early seeds of agriculture, and groundbreaking developments in medicine and astronomy. With breathtaking intimacy and grace, Al-Rashid brings their lives—with all their anxieties, aspirations, and intimacies—vividly close to our own.
Here’s an interview w the author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7NjYvERPqE&t=1s
Order the book: https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324036425
