The epic, five millennia history of the region between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers that was the birthplace of civilization and remains today the essential crossroads between East and West
At the start of the fourth millennium BC, at the edge of historical time, civilization first arrived with the advent of cities and the invention of writing that began to replace legend with history. This occurred on the floodplains of southern Iraq where the great rivers Tigris and Euphrates meet the Persian Gulf. By 3000 BC, a city called Uruk (from which “Iraq” is derived) had 80,000 residents. Indeed, as Bartle Bull reveals in his magisterial history, “if one divides the 5,000 years of human civilization into ten periods of five centuries each, during the first nine of these the world’s leading city was in one of the three regions of current day Iraq”—or to use its Greek name, Mesopotamia.
Inspired by extensive reporting from the region to spend a decade delving deep into its history, Bull chronicles the story of Iraq from the exploits of Gilgamesh (almost certainly an historical figure) to the fall of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958 that ushered in its familiar modern era. The land between the rivers has been the melting pot and battleground of countless outsiders, from the Akkadians of Hammurabi and the Greeks of Alexander to the Ottomans of Suleiman the Magnificent. Here, by the waters of Babylon, Judaism was born and the Sunni-Shia schism took its bloody shape.
Central themes play out over the millennia: humanity’s need for freedom versus the co-eternal urge of tyranny; the ever-present conflict and cross-fertilization of East and West with Iraq so often the hinge. We tend to view today’s tensions in the Middle East through the prism of the last hundred years since the Treaty of Versailles imposed a controversial realignment of its borders. Bartle Bull’s remarkable, sweeping achievement reminds us that the region defined by the land between the rivers has for five millennia played a uniquely central role on the global stage.
US Bartle Bullhas written from the Middle East for theNew York Times,Washington Post,Wall Street Journal,Financial Times,Daily Telegraph,Foreign Policy,Die Welt, and other publications. He is the only western journalist to have been embedded with the Mahdi Army in Iraq. He sits on the Visiting Committee of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. His 2017 Showtime documentary filmCradle of Champions, following three young athletes competing in the world’s oldest amateur boxing tournament, received numerous awards and rave reviews.
Praise forLand Between the Rivers:
“A sweeping and superbly written epic . . . Bull highlights the human, and humanist, threads in the political tapestry.”—Dominic Green,Wall Street Journal
“Inspired by firsthand experience of the region . . . Conceptual originality and laudable ambition.”—Marc Van de Mieroop,New York Times Book Review
“A sweeping history of the cradle of civilization between the Tigris and the Euphrates, underscoring the region’s unique gifts to humanity. As a journalist and longtime observer of the region rather than a historian, Bull conveys the excitement of uncovering new intellectual treasures for the reader as he moves from the first Sumerian civilization to the archaeological discoveries at Nineveh in the 1840s . . . Engaging research and bottomless detail by an avid observer and student of the region.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Succeeds in weaving this daunting welter of material into a work that is not just clear and coherent, but also enthralling and thought-provoking . . . [Bull] makes excellent use of the journalist
