The cuneiform tablet from the 6th century BC shows an aerial view map of Mesopotamia — roughly modern-day Iraq — and what the Babylonians believed lay beyond the known world at the time.

A new and spellbinding book tells the history of the very ancient past of Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Between Two Rivers by Moudhy Al-Rashid, a researcher at the ...