{"product_id":"between-two-rivers","title":"Between Two Rivers","description":"\u003ch2\u003eMoudhy Al-Rashid\u003c\/h2\u003e\n \u003cbr\u003e\n \u003cb\u003eOne of \u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e's Best Books of 2025\u003cbr\u003e\n \u003cbr\u003e\n “Breathes life into the dry clay of philology.” —Dominic Green, \u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n \u003cbr\u003e\n Humanity’s earliest efforts at recording and drawing meaning from history reveal how lives millennia ago were not so different from our own.\n \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThousands of years ago, in a part of the world we now call ancient Mesopotamia, people began writing things down for the very first time.\u003c\/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003eWhat 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eBetween Two Rivers\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003eMillennia 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"PRH","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":59858705219870,"sku":"9781324134589","price":26.99,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0669\/3584\/9246\/files\/9781324134589.jpg?v=1787931754","url":"https:\/\/www.cedarcanoebooks.com\/products\/between-two-rivers","provider":"Cedar Canoe Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}