The rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates. It was between these two rivers that civilisation started. The first cities, the first writing, the first schools, the first bureaucracies. And because the Mesopotamians wrote everything down on clay tablets, what they wrote has survived much better than later civilisations that wrote on more perishable mediums. But it’s one thing digging up these cuneiform tablets, it’s another thing reading them. The last native reader of Mesopotamian died thousands of years ago.

So it was a pretty big deal when cuneiform was deciphered. But where the story differs from Egyptian hiergoglyphs (which were also a big deal when they were translated) is how many cuneiform tablets have survived. University departments have cupboards full of the things, waiting someone to come and read them.

Al-Rashid does an excellent job of conveying the excitement of discovery and she makes the point, repeatedly, that despite the gulf in time that separates us, the people who wrote, or figured in, these rediscovered writings were people like us. I do think she overeggs that point: yes, they were human, so they share the basic hopes, fears and dreams that unite humanity but it would have been more interesting to learn more about how they differed, for differ they surely did. Their mental and spiritual landscape was very different from ours, as indeed was their geography.

In the end, this is a book that conveys the author’s passion for a subject very well but, unfortunately, at least for me, it didn’t convey much of the actual subject.