Captivating History Eastern

In December 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made a speech about a conflict that had some leading figures in Britain and France, including Churchill himself, briefly discussing the idea of going to war with the Soviet Union, even though they were already fighting Adolf Hitler. Of course, war makes strange bedfellows, and one year later, Churchill would find himself allied with the Soviet Union against Germany and Finland. It’s an interesting saga, one with roots in imperial Russian history and the desire of the Finns to be free in their northern forests.

No nation suffered more losses during the Second World War than the Soviet Union. The figure most historians recognize as roughly accurate is 20 million. The exact figure is impossible to tally for a number of reasons: destroyed records, inexact pre-war records, Soviet politicization of the population figures before and after the war, and much more. No matter what the exact total was, what is known is that the Soviet population only recovered its losses from the war in the late 1950s.

The civilizations that grew up in the Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys many thousands of years ago have left important legacies: agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, the wheel, and writing. This present volume of Mesopotamian myths is divided into three sections.