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

Written by Bartle Bull
Read by Jonathan Keeble
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 22 hrs and 17 mins
Release date: 09-05-24
Publisher: 2024 W.F. Howes Ltd, Tantor Audio

Land 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.

As Bartle Bull reveals in his magisterial history, “if one divides the 5000 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.

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.

Central themes play out over the millennia: humanity’s need for freedom versus the co-eternal urge of tyranny; the 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. Bull’s 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.