Man’s first instinct has always been to return to the sea

Travelling the Indus valley late in the third millennium BC you would have been awed by two Bronze Age megacities, 320 miles apart, ‘massive and tightly planned, very similar in layout’, their bricks and measures standardised, evidence of rigid authority. Their trade goods included Afghan lapis lazuli, Omani vases, legal seals from Sumeria, carnelian beads, packed for dispatch to Sumer — and that is almost all that is left of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, and more than we know of them.

Their names are modern labels. This section of The Boundless Sea, David Abulafia’s fascinating ‘human history of the oceans’, is one of many moments of thrilling implication. (Do not assume anyone will know the name of London in 5,000 years’ time.) Pirates and sea battles, navigators, cartographers and many resonant characters illumine his elegant pages; but what emerges is an engrossing history of seaborne trade and discovery, the threading together of
the globe.