Book Club: Monday, December 7, 2026, 2-4pm. Fellows and External Fellows – Zoom only event

December 7, 2026,  2-4 pm – Fellows and External Fellows

Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid (2025)

Discussion Leader: Martin Klein

This is a wonderful, engaging book that takes a thematic not simply chronological approach to Mesopotamian history. The author begins with objects found in what may have been the world’s earliest museum, a room in the 6th century BCE palace of Princess Ennigaldi-Nanna whose objects reveal its history much as museums do today. Here lay clay tablets showing the invention of writing, while exposing so much of the life of the civilization and its people:

“schools and students, kings and slaves, traders and pub-keepers, astronomers and diviners), science, the role of women, art and war…including not just regal pronouncements, poetry and mathematical treatises but letters, receipts, schoolboy exercises and lullabies: the stuff of everyday life.” (Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books.)

Moudhy, a citizen of Saudi Arabia and teacher at Oxford, succeeds in bringing ancient Mesopotamia to life in ways we moderns can readily understand. (Available in hardcover, paperback and e-book formats; 336 pages)

The link to register is https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/fv7gazAU3W

The deadline to register is the Monday morning the day of the event at 8 am. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.

If you have any questions, please contact the organizer, Mary Jane Ashley at maryjane.ashley@utoronto.ca.