S8 Ep264: THE STORIES TOLD BY MESOPOTAMIAN BRICKS Colleague Moudhy Al-Rashid. Moudhy Al-Rashid explains how millions of mud bricks reveal the history of ancient Mesopotamia, from the construction of massive temples to the 9-kilometer wall of Uruk. These bricks were

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.5 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 30 December 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

THE STORIES TOLD BY MESOPOTAMIAN BRICKS Colleague Moudhy Al-Rashid. Moudhy Al-Rashidexplains how millions of mud bricks reveal the history of ancient Mesopotamia, from the construction of massive temples to the 9-kilometer wall of Uruk. These bricks were often stamped with the names of kings to ensure their deeds were known to the gods. Beyond royal propaganda, bricks preserve intimate moments, such as the accidental paw prints of dogs or footprints of children left while the clay dried in the sun. NUMBER 2
1880 UR EXPEDITION

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0:00.0	Worried about your future in tech?
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0:24.1	Ready to tap in?
0:25.9	Visit us at pluralsight.com to learn more.
0:34.7	This is CBSI on the world.
0:37.1	I'm John Batchel in a time machine, thanks to Mudi al-Rashid, her new book Between Two Rivers,
0:42.9	Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History.
0:45.4	We leave the first millennium BC, and we travel back in time.
0:49.2	There are four or five cities that are necessary to talk about,
0:53.5	and each of them are billed of bricks.
0:56.4	What kind of bricks?
0:57.6	Bricks from the mud, the clay mud, of the Taggars and Euphrates, which are going back and
1:03.9	forth like whipping snakes over these thousands of years.
1:08.7	3,000 was wetter than 2,000,
1:15.5	and the climate of today is not typical of all of these periods.
1:18.4	So I just mentioned climate is a moving story too.
1:23.2	But we go to the bricks that themselves that build the cities.
	...

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