Week One Between Two Rivers Course

Every course has to begin somewhere, and this one begins with a sentence you have almost certainly read before:

Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilisation.

It sits at the top of textbook chapters, museum wall panels, and documentary voiceovers so consistently that it stops sounding like a claim at all. It just sounds like a fact. That is precisely why we are starting here, in Week One, rather than with a king or a ziggurat: before we spend a year taking Mesopotamian evidence seriously, it is worth asking who first decided this was the place where everything began, and why.