Excerpt from Between Two Rivers by Moudhy Al-Rashid, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Introduction

Mesopotamia Matters

A stepped pyramid soars almost 100 feet above the sprawling ruins of the city of Ur, which once sat at the mouth of the Euphrates River in the sandy expanse of what is now southern Iraq. The meandering waters of the river changed course millennia ago, leaving the inhabitants of Ur with no choice but to abandon the desiccated site. In what remains of this ancient city, in the shadow of the pyramid, lie the ruins of a small palace built for a princess over 2,000 years ago. For those millennia, most of Ur has remained buried; only after careful excavation did it start to reveal its many ancient secrets.

When excavators began to uncover the princess's palace in the 1920s, they found a seemingly ordinary chamber with an eroded but otherwise intact brick floor. That floor was so covered in layers of dust and ancient rubbish that the diggers initially doubted they would find a single relic of its long-gone inhabitants. But over the course of several days, they managed to clear away enough of the rubble to reveal an extraordinary collection of artefacts. To their confusion, though, each object they found was from a different era in Ur's past, rather than all of them dating to the time when the palace was built. Why would this apparently random mix of objects, with hundreds of years between them, all be together in one room? The excavators were facing an archaeological puzzle.

Every archaeological dig begins on the surface. In a previously undisturbed site, the land looks distended, like a belly pregnant with possibility. Maybe only a broken brick, jagged pottery shards, and flecks of bitumen hint at what lies below the layers of sand and soil. It is these hints, however, that show that the mound of earth, or tell in Arabic, is not a geological feature of the landscape. It is not a hill or some other thing that has almost always been there; beneath this unassuming mass of dirt lie multitudes of stories that time has buried.

At a dinner many years ago, a man I barely knew asked me why we had to dig to find archaeology. It felt a bit like he was annoyed at me personally that the field of archaeology was not easy. Why are the buildings not on the surface? Why is the stuff so deep and difficult to get to? Every question in what quickly began to feel less like a conversation and more like a cross-examination had the same frank answer: people's stuff. Wherever there are people, there is their compacted trash. A mud house gets rebuilt atop the foundations of an older crumbling one, the broken bits of the inhabitants' things get buried under the new building or over time spill into the road outside, and that road gets repaved a few inches higher than the previous road, over and over again, locking into place clues about the people who inhabited each layer. In the case of Ur, deposits reach 65 feet below the visible hints at civilisation on the surface.

Archaeologists love exactly this kind of garbage. An archaeologist 5,000 years from now sifting through my bin would find, among other things, some overzealous Amazon packaging, the discarded top of a yogurt pot, and an empty packet of dog treats. They might conclude that I had a more or less domesticated dog, was not lactose intolerant, and worshipped a deity called 'Amazon' whose iconography included a faceless smile capped by an arrow at one end (or, according to comedian Jimmy Kimmel, a stylised penis). You can learn a lot about a culture from the things its people throw away, and the layers left behind are precisely why we have to dig.

But some monuments tower so high that they remain immune to the accumulation of detritus from the lives of those long since dead. In the case of Ur, the stepped pyramid – called a ziggurat – never fully disappeared under the dirt like much of the city. Thousands of years after its first bricks were laid, it still stood, with less obvious buildings buried at its feet. The princess's palace had been built in its shadow in the sixth century BCE when the princess was alive and Ur was a flourishing city in a region known as Mesopotamia – a name that comes from the Greek meaning 'between the rivers', as the area was nestled between and around the fast-flowing River Tigris and the languorous Euphrates. The name for the region in Arabic, bilad bein al-nahrein – 'the land between two rivers' – also invokes the Tigris and Euphrates, highlighting the importance of these life-giving bodies of water to the many ancient civilisations that rose and fell here over millennia.

Excerpted from Between Two Rivers by Moudhy Al-Rashid. Copyright © 2025 by Moudhy Al-Rashid. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.