‘City life … is not the same as an urban destiny’, Greg Woolf states in the afterword to his monograph on ancient cities (421). This is a thought-provoking closing statement to a book of 500-plus pages about ancient cities. The book is a welcome contribution on a topic which has driven more than a century of intensive research, ever since the start of extensive excavations of sites such as Ur. Books on cities and their histories are in vogue. Monica Smith's recent Cities: The First 6,000 Years (2019) is another good example, with a very different take. The surge in attention to urban histories and the role of cities is reflected in new book series, research initiatives and courses taught at universities. Cities have been compared and discussed from a variety of angles, traversing both time and space, and are often considered an inevitable aspect of human evolution — of civilisation. However, one of W.'s central arguments is that cities have not been a constant feature of past societies, but rather appear in transient ‘urban moments’, which rarely lasted more than a few centuries. The point might seem obvious, but it needs to be made over and over again, since the Mediterranean region is still too often seen as having been characterised by urban societies throughout its history. In essence, W.'s book is a counter-argument to the all-too-common evolutionary narratives that, explicitly or implicitly, see cities as products of civilisation and indices of which societies were successful. His perspective forces us to think about urban moments and the implications of such an approach for prevailing narratives of Mediterranean history.

The large, but under-illustrated, monograph is structured in four parts: ‘An urban animal’, ‘An urban Mediterranean’, ‘Imperial urbanisms’ and ‘De-urbanisation’. (While the first three are substantial, the last is a shorter closing chapter. It is debatable whether de-urbanisation is really the appropriate description for the final topic, especially in a book that aims to break with the evolutionary perspectives on urbanism.) The book as a whole takes as its point of departure the societies and settlement structures of the prehistoric Levant, which it analyses as forerunners to Mediterranean urbanism, but also as representing very different kinds of urban societies than those that developed ‘around the pond’, as Aristotle called the Mediterranean. The book offers stunning overviews and insights, placing archaeological evidence at the heart of the topic. W. underlines more than once that ‘much more can be learned if we begin from the archaeology’ — a great sentence to see in print (176). It is too often forgotten in narratives of urban history that it is, in fact, the archaeology of cities that makes their histories.

While it is true that most people in Mediterranean Antiquity did not live in cities (419), it would have been good to see discussion of how such people were still impacted by cities. How far away would one have had to live from a city in order for it not to impact one's life? While it might have been true for some places or some periods that cities did not affect all people, the urban moments in the Mediterranean region would surely have impacted all people in one way or another. Here the network perspective comes into the picture. W. writes about networks, networking and connections between cities as vehicles driving such network possibilities, but he does not write about the weak — but crucial — ties in these networks. These might, in fact, have been the ones pivotal to ancient history, as they are today — as recently illustrated by two prominent examples: the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ever Given container ship stuck for five days in the Suez Canal.

With a topic as exciting and central as urban history, there are naturally things to disagree with, but there are many more to applaud. W.'s stimulating contribution should spark wider debate about the broad narratives that best fit the vast range of evidence. Naturally there will be differences of opinion between those coming from text- and archaeology-based perspectives, but this well-written and provocative account will force all in the field to think harder about an urgent set of questions about the role of the city in ancient history and culture, finally breaking free from the influence of Childe and Weber, who — for all the importance of their contributions to the development of the field — can no longer be taken as the starting points of debate. The monograph is an impressive overview of trends in urban histories and will have an impact outside the field of archaeology and ancient history, underlining the centrality of these disciplines to the humanities and social sciences in general, as well as to a wider audience. It is certainly worth the long read to let oneself be carried through urban moments from the Levantine and Mediterranean prehistory into Late Antiquity and beyond. It is a hugely enjoyable read that reminds us that cities and settlements are creations of, and tools for, humans, creating possibilities and unforeseen hindrances in our lives.