Investigating the human past in this way is not a matter of searching for utopia, but of freeing us to think about the true possibilities of human existence. Unhampered by outdated theoretical assumptions and dogmatic interpretations of obsolete data, could we look with fresh eyes at the very meaning of terms like ‘civilisation’? Our species has existed for something like 300,000 years. Today, we stand on a precipice, confronting a future defined by environmental collapse, the erosion of democracy, and wars of unprecedented destructiveness: a new age of empire, perhaps the last in a cycle of such ages that, for all we really know, may represent only a modest fraction of the human experience.

were, in fact, disarmingly frank about the quality of their data: ‘we wouldn’t attempt to disguise the hypothetical nature of our treatment of the earlier periods … we haven’t just pulled the figures out of the sky. Well, not often.’ Their own acknowledgement of the provisional, hypothetical nature of some of these figures is interesting, since Scheidel is hardly alone in basing some extremely broad assertions on this single, dated source.

Over the past few decades, geographical spaces once written off as blanks on the map, or dismissed as ‘an unchanging palaeolithic backwater’ (as our 1978 Atlas puts it, for Aboriginal Australia), have been flooded with new data. Archaeology, specifically rapid advances in settlement archaeology and methods of survey, has been one major contributor. Among other things, these new techniques are revealing entire traditions of urban life, spanning centuries or even millennia, where none were previously suspected. All of them lie within the scope of the past 5,000 years, but surprisingly few can be convincingly identified with the rise of bureaucratically ordered kingdoms or empires.

Scholars of the ancient Near East once tookʿApiru to be an early reference to the Hebrews, but it’s now thought to be an umbrella term, used almost indiscriminately for any group of political defectors, dissenters, insurgents or refugees who threatened the interests of Egypt’s vassals in neighbouring Canaan (much as some modern politicians have been known to use the word ‘terrorist’ for rhetorical effect today).