Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000-Year History of Iraq

At the start of the fourth millennium BC, civilization 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 rivers Tigris and Euphrates meet the Persian Gulf. 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 thre...