To quote Private Frazer in Dad’s Army, ‘We’re doomed, doomed!’ That seems to be the message of Paul Cooper’s eminently readable series of essays about how and why 14 civilisations rose to greatness and then collapsed. He begins with the Sumerians in the fourth millennium BC, at the northern tip of the Persian Gulf, and
Some of popular culture’s most famous ghosts and demons have roots in ancient Mesopotamia. What did ancient humans believe about the supernatural? And what stories did they tell?