Norton, 336 pages, $31.99
On the night of Sept. 26, 554 B.C., a partial lunar eclipse was visible over Babylon. King Nabonidus, presiding on behalf of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty, took this as a message from the moon god, Sin. The king, notes Moudhy Al-Rashid in "Between Two Rivers," followed the ancient protocol and installed his daughter as high priestess at the ancient city of Ur.
Nabonidus, the very model of a Neo-Babylonian monarch, renamed her in the old Sumerian language that was still being used in ritual matters. The Sumerians had known Sin as Nanna. Nabonidus' daughter, Ms. Al-Rashid writes, became Ennigaldi-Nanna, "the high priestess requested by the god Nanna." Her original name is lost.
Excavations led by the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley in the 1920s unearthed Ennigaldi-Nanna's palace at Ur. Inhabited for nearly 3,500 years by the time of Nabonidus, Ur was a layer cake of civilizational debris -- Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian. Ennigaldi-Nanna's priestly pseudonym was much the same, linking her to an ancient sequence stretching back to the third millennium B.C. and to Enheduanna, whose poems to the goddess Inana made her the first named author in history.
Each layer of Ur's historical cake was packed with cuneiform tablets of incised clay. The earliest cuneiform tablets, found at nearby Uruk, date to roughly 3350 B.C. They mark the inception of writing and the centralized, bureaucratic state -- and history as we know it, a written record that describes both its time and the eras before.
In one chamber of Ennigaldi-Nanna's palace, Ms. Al-Rashid recounts, Woolley found all those layers of Ur's past in a single place. A small obelisk -- carved with deities, symbols and monsters -- dated to around 1400 B.C. A clay cone covered in cuneiform script dated to around 1900 B.C. The remains of a royal statue and the round granite head of a mace seemed to be older still. There was also a clay cylinder, dated to the 600s B.C., that described "a mud brick dated to 2100 BCE from the era of King Amar-Suen."
Discovering a 15-century span of items on the same floor was akin to "finding a sculpture of the Greek god Zeus alongside bronze Islamic coins minted by a seventh-century caliph in a castle built by Christian Crusaders." The objects in the chamber might have been thrown together by a collapsing structure, but they were more likely found by builders and, as we now say, curated. They were assembled and preserved with a purpose. That cylinder, Ms. Al-Rashid writes, might be the "world's first museum label."
"Between Two Rivers" is a search for human traces amid the mountains of cuneiform fragments that, stamped by human hands, carry the source code of the harsh, impassive civilizations that rose and fell between the Tigris and Euphrates. The Greeks called this fertile terrain Mesopotamia; its Arabic name, bilad bein al-nahrein, gives Ms. Al-Rashid her title.
"War made the state, and the state made war," the historian Charles Tilly wrote. Both required taxes, and taxes required bureaucracy. The Sumerians invented cuneiform and used the script to expand their monopoly on force into a monopoly on information. The same impulse centralized the state-making value of mathematics, astronomy, irrigation, urban planning and probably even the wheel.
The administrative state of the Sumerians and their successors organized the intermediate realm between the kings of the earth and the gods of the planets. The earthly hierarchy served a divine order, and the divine ordered the people to honor the king and the priest as all-powerful intermediaries on earth. The reed imprints on the soft clay harden into images of coercive power.
The "beating heart" of Uruk's agricultural administration, Ms. Al-Rashid writes, was a district known as Eanna, meaning "House of Heaven." One of the largest buildings at Eanna, from the fourth millennium B.C., is made from more than one million bricks of mud and straw. Ms. Al-Rashid, an honorary fellow at Oxford, finds glimpses of the mundane in "clay snapshots of real lives" and "happy accidents." One day in the reign of King Ur-Nammu, a dog stepped onto a tray of bricks that lay drying in the sun and left two paw prints. At Sippar in the Old Babylonian period, the cloistered women of a temple community used a group of female scribes to record their legal and business dealings. One of the scribes, Amat-Mamu, worked there for at least four decades.
In the early second millennium B.C., a wet nurse at Idamaras (near modern Baghdad) sold a Babylonian girl into slavery when the town was raided. Years later, when Hammurabi united the regions of Mesopotamia, "the slaver who purchased the young girl became a Babylonian subject and was forced to release her, making this unnamed woman one of the earliest recorded survivors of human trafficking."
When Nabonidus interpreted the partial eclipse as an order to promote his daughter, one of his court scholars came to the king's palace, produced the relevant case law from a basket-load of tablets and argued from precedent that no prior omen endorsed Nabonidus' reading. The king ordered his scholars to perform divination on a sheep's innards until the omens complied.
Ennigaldi-Nanna entered what Ms. Al-Rashid calls a "divine-human throuple" with Sin and his divine wife, Ningal. The highlight of the ritual year was her annual "sacred marriage" to Sin, which ensured a good harvest. A public parade culminated in "fake or real sex" in a temple or palace, with a priest playing the part of Sin.
Ms. Al-Rashid breathes life into the dry clay of philology and bureaucracy, but she frequently obstructs the ancient image with a veil of autobiographical digression. Her determination to make the past accessible is admirable but not always convincing. Did the invocations of midwives function, as Ms. Al-Rashid speculates, "rather like hypnobirthing in today's world, a guided visualization to help manage fear and move things along"? Probably not. The Sumerians and their successors didn't have myths and hypnosis. They had beliefs and gods. They believed that children's cries might awaken the kusarikkum, a "deity with a bison's body and a human head who guards the home." The stars were the midwives' handbook: "If Venus is dimmed at her right side, women will have difficulty giving birth."
War, Ms. Al-Rashid writes, was "ugly and scary and sad." This reality, she writes, "inspired myths and gods to help make sense of such suffering." This may be a pop-psychological projection. Mesopotamia's brutal iconography celebrates massacres and slavery in the service of the gods. "Stone reliefs from the palaces of Neo-Assyrian kings," Ms. Al-Rashid writes, "leave behind disturbing images of brutality, and their written chronologies detail vivid acts of violence, including the flayed skins of enemies and their severed heads on stakes." So much for her conclusion that these victories "had no real winners." This was a world of winners and losers, brutality and brute force.
In 539 B.C. the Persian emperor Cyrus would conquer Babylon. A cylinder written by the victors reports that Cyrus "freed" the Babylonians from the cruel and "incompetent" Nabonidus. The fates of Nabonidus and Ennigaldi-Nanna are unknown.
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Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.” [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books: The Dawn of a Civilization. Green, Dominic. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 23 Aug 2025: C9.
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