Four Lost Cities

We all would’ve learnt about ancient civilisations in history. But what do we really know about them? Why did people abandon those sophisticated civilisations? These may be questions for archeologists, but as a history seeker I’ve always had these questions in mind.

The Four Lost Cities - we follow the exploration of four ancient forgotten civilisations along with the author Annalee Newitz. Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today.

With fascinating details, archeological insights and rich cultural background, this is how ancient history should be written. Anyone who is interested in history would like this book. The author is a cohost of Hugo award winning podcast Our Opinions are correct! She is the author of Future of another timeline that will interest time travel enthusiast and scifi lovers alike!!

Thank you Netgalley & publisher for the eARC in exchange for an honest opinion!

A rich, heavily textured book. The first section, on the Neolithic Çatalhöyük, was particularly interesting to me: what archaeology and anthropology reveal about the way people lived when they first began to live together in a settled way. The details of the burials - keeping dead family close, under your floor - moved me and have stayed with me, although I read this book several months ago. It opened a door into a vanished time and a vanished way of life. Angkor, too, was particularly well-handled and described here. This is an excellent book: the granular detail of scientific discovery is specific but never dry, and without ever taking her feet from the ground or launching into unearned flights of fancy, Newitz manages to show us a great deal about both what was commonly thought about these civilisations, what is now known, and how we know what we know; the process and evidence through which we have learned what life was like in them, and how they came to be. They come back to life.

I first picked up this book because I really enjoyed Annalee Newitz’s 2019 book called The Future of Another Timeline. Since I enjoyed their fiction writing, I was hoping that their newest nonfiction book would be equally entertaining and enjoyable. Luckily, I was correct! This book was a great read and very informative about the history of civilizations of which I had very little prior knowledge. It is easy for a book packed with this much information to be dry and boring, getting lost in the details, but it read like prose. I learned a lot but was still entertained and interested.

Newitz mentions in the book that they started researching this book seven years ago. They had tended to write about the present or future of cities, but a sudden life change made them want to investigate the past a bit closer. Newitz debunks and challenges the idea of the “lost city” in this book by explaining the term’s history and its interaction with the colonization of the countries where they are located. There are four “lost” cities profiled in this book: Çatalhüyük (a Neolithic city in Turkey), Pompeii (Roman resort town in Italy), Angkor (giant Medieval city in Cambodia), and Cahokia (Indigenous city on the Mississippi River). Newitz talks to a ton of experts (archaeologists, anthropologists, historians) on each city/population in this book. It was fascinating for me to read about how these professionals can learn about the lives of individuals living thousands of years ago by studying ruins, artifacts, and topography.

The chapters of the book that I liked the best were the ones about Angkor in Cambodia. The metropolis’ demise was attributed to political instability meeting extreme climate change. Does that sound familiar? I liked that this chapter went into more detail about the social and political issues that may have happened in the city during its life and that caused its gradual death. It was interesting to read about the class dynamics of Angkor because it was written in an engaging way. Each section did talk some about social and political issues in the cities, but Angkor’s was the most eye-opening to me personally.

There is so much more to say about this book, but for the sake of brevity, it was great – there was not a bad part of this book. Four Cities is an ancient history book for people who are not necessarily academics but want to learn about the past. I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in ancient history, travel, politics and social structures, and architecture.