Bartle Bull’s objective in the very readable Land Between the Rivers is to demonstrate that the modern country of Iraq is not a mere colonial creation but rather has a historical reality going back millennia.
The earliest antecedent posited for Iraq’s name is the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk, birthplace of writing, the place where Gilgamesh was king, and greatest of the early cities in the small region in southern Iraq where civilization was born. The term “Iraq” has been used by Arabs to describe much of the present-day country of that name since at least the sixth century AD.
He goes on:
The last word on the question of whether Iraq really is a distinct place, historically, can be given to the following fact. If one divides the five thousand 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 …
It is salutary to hear a history of the world told from a perspective that isn’t based on Greco-Roman-Judaeo-Christian throughlines. And what a history it is: Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Medes, Babylonians, Abbasids … with appearances by such personalities as Gilgamesh, Abraham, Tiglath-Pileser, Ashurbanipal, Cyrus, Alexander, Seleucus, Khosrow, Hussein ibn Ali, Mamoun, Suleiman, Faisal.
Land Between the Rivers is an easy read, with a flowing narrative line and long, interesting digressions on such subjects as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Zoroastrianism and its influence on the Abrahamic religions and the “ramshackle” Pathian Empire’s predilection for Hellenism (the court was rather fond of Euripides)—Bull tells a nice story how the Parthians dissembled to keep Chinese ambassadors away from Rome so they keep control of the trade:
Chinese silk went west in heavy brocade, and then was unraveled and rewoven into lighter weaves in the Roman Levant. The Parthians then sold the silk back to the Chinese, pretending that this more refined product had originated in the Roman Empire.
Unlike many books of longue durée which race through ancient and medieval history, Bull dedicates most of Land Between the Rivers to the pre-modern period. He doesn’t get to modern history until page 362, more than two-thirds in. (There is a centuries-long gap, however, between Suleiman the Magnificent and Henry Layard’s scouting of Iraq’s archaeological sites in the 1840s.)
Bull can however be a bit a glib in his claims for regional exceptionalism: he says the Sumerians invented writing as if this were a unique event in human history (the Chinese, to say nothing of the Maya, might beg to differ). He writes that “the Sumerians invented kingship, priesthood, diplomacy, law, and war”—which surely depends on what one means by these somewhat amorphous terms—as well as “the wheel” (something notoriously hard to pin down; the most recent research indicates it may have been developed in the Carpathian copper mines). He finds “the fundamental institution of democracy, an assembly (bicameral, no less) of citizens” in the Epic of Gilgamesh, an interesting but quite possibly anachronistic reading. None of these claims are critical to his thesis; some circumspection might here have been the better part of valor.
Bull’s “five thousand years of human civilization” echoes similar language from and about China; Bull drops hints that this is deliberate. But herein lies the rub, for while China can arguably claim a more or less continuous cultural throughline, what began with Uruk and continued through Babylon was interrupted by Alexander the Great and Hellenism, which was in turn replaced by Islam, entirely different cultures. For the last 2500 years, indeed, Iraq (unlike China) was not a land at the center but rather a land between (“limes”, as Bull himself refers to it): between the Persians and Romans, Persians and Arabs, Sunnis and Shi‘ias, and so it arguably remains today.
Nor does Bull’s otherwise engaging historical narrative entirely follow his thesis: much of the material takes place either outside Iraq or involves outsiders: Abraham (who left), Zoroaster, Alexander, Muhammad, the Achaemenids, Umayyads (based in Syria), Averroes, the Ottomans, the Safavids. The difficulty arises from the conflation of Mesopotamia (a geographical concept) with Iraq (a modern polity).
That being said, Mesopotamia has a good claim on being both incomprehensibly ancient and central to world history to an extent now often under-appreciated, an oversight that Land Between the Rivers should go a long (enjoyable) way to correcting.