Greco-Roman civilisation has dominated ancient history for too long

What have the Akkadians ever done for us? As it turns out, rather a lot, as Philip Matyszak reveals in this lively, handsomely produced study of peoples and tribes whose PR departments were a smidgeon less muscular than the Romans’. Their obscure names are woven into our language: we sing ‘Land me safe on Canaan’s side’; we talk of oligarchs as ‘rich as Croesus’; we quote the Assyrian coming down ‘like the wolf on the fold’; and the aesthete’s go-to insult, ‘philistine’. Their stories, however, are not, and this book attempts to fill in the gaps.

Given the scale and general lack of evidence, there’s a broad-brush approach; but this is more than made up for by a highly engaging style. The first known city was Uruk, built in 3500 BC. The capital of the Akkadian empire, it was later ruled by Sargon, whose story closely resembles that of Romulus and Remus — ‘though apparently Sargon grew up a gardener, while the founders of Rome began their careers as shepherds’. We still can’t find the city of Akkad — a reminder of the amount of stuff that we will probably never know. But the Akkadians were responsible for how empires were structured, and their imprint looms large.

The scale of endeavour and civilisation is vast. I am used to dealing with Greeks and Romans, so feel positively provincial when confronted by Nabonidus, the ‘archaeologist king’ of Babylon. The artefacts he unearthed were even more ancient when he found them than the ruins of his own civilisation are today.

The Bronze Age collapse brought chaos. The Mycenean Greeks and the Hittites, as well as ‘dozens of minor civilisations’, fell like dominos, sending thousands rocketing around the Mediterranean in search of new homes. Many of these led to romantic theories: the mysterious Sea Peoples, for instance, were thought to be Minoans, or even Trojans fleeing the burning city.