Land Between the Rivers: A 5000-Year History of Iraq

Elegant erudite ambitious inventive - a remarkable blend of research imagination and first-hand experience-Rory StewartLand Between the Rivers is the result of ten years of research writing and thinking about the subject. It is an enormous topic: five thousand years beginning with Gilgamesh at the edge of historical time. It is a big topic in another way. More than anywhere else the famous Land Between the Rivers where civilization was born where East and West have mixed and clashed since long before Alexander has led an existence that could be called from a certain perspective a history of the world.We begin the story with ancient Sumer and Gilgamesh building the walls of Uruk ('Iraq') to make a great name for himself around the turn of the third millennium BC. We end it in 1958 as the last royal family of Iraq is slaughtered on the steps of a small royal palace in Baghdad the most effervescent free and promising capital in the Middle East. Above all the story of Iraq the world's hinge country is that of the great clash pitting humanism against the outlooks of power and fate.