At the start of the fourth millennium BC, civilization arrived with the advent of cities and the invention of writing that began to replace legend with history. This occurred on the floodplains of southern Iraq where the rivers Tigris and Euphrates meet the Persian Gulf. As Bartle Bull reveals in his magisterial history, "if one divides the 5000 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"—or to use its Greek name, Mesopotamia.

Bull chronicles the story of Iraq from the exploits of Gilgamesh to the fall of the Iraqi monarchy that ushered in its modern era. The land between the rivers has been the melting pot and battleground of countless outsiders. Here, Judaism was born and the Sunni-Shia schism took its bloody shape.

Central themes play out over the millennia: humanity's need for freedom versus the co-eternal urge of tyranny; the conflict and cross-fertilization of East and West with Iraq so often the hinge. We tend to view today's tensions in the Middle East through the prism of the last hundred years. Bull's sweeping achievement reminds us that the region defined by the land between the rivers has for five millennia played a uniquely central role on the global stage.