No one walks among the wild goats and darting snakes of the mountain, its steppe where grew the succulent plants grew nothing but the reed of tears … Akkad is destroyed!

This lament is from the ‘Curse of Akkad’, a poem written about the fall of the Akkadian Empire, which reigned more than 4,000 years ago in the Near East. Yet it’s more myth than reality: despite the tragic language about a destroyed city, the capital of Akkad did not disappear. It was still occupied and, later, new kings took over its rule: the Third Dynasty of Ur. That empire fell too, eventually, and is also remembered through literature written years after its demise: ‘The malicious storm which swept over the Land, the storm which destroyed cities, the storm which destroyed houses … the storm which cut off all that is good from the Land.’ This natural disaster was apparently caused by Enlil, the god of the winds. Yet there’s no archaeological evidence for this.

Imprint made from a cylinder seal from the Third Dynasty of Ur, possibly depicting king Ur-Nammu (right). Courtesy the British Museum, London

In fact, as far as we can tell, life continued normally for citizens of Akkad and Ur. As the archaeologist Guy Middleton points out in Understanding Collapse (2017), the empires may have died, but the average person might not have even noticed.

Until recently, many archaeologists focused on revealing the cultural glories and dynastic power of such civilisations. The Akkadians left us cuneiform records (writing inscribed with reeds onto clay) and staggering ziggurats (massive, terraced, flat-topped temples). And Ur-Namma, the first king of the Third Dynasty of Ur, left us the earliest known legal code. This means that popular perceptions of many past empires, such as Rome or the Qin, focus on their great artwork and monumental achievements, such as the Colosseum or the Great Wall of China.

In recent years, many archaeologists and historians have taken a different approach, asking: what was it like as an ordinary person to live through these imperial collapses? You may assume that a collapse in the imperial superstructure meant that people went hungry and homeless, and that is certainly the picture in the poems of lamentation and sorrow. But the physical evidence of people’s health, for instance, shows something very different.

As a researcher who studies the causes of civilisation collapse to inform policy in the present, I believe this matters. In textbooks, museums and popular culture, history is often told as a tale of rise and fall. It is a story of human progress during the reign of empires and kingdoms, followed by regression and barbarism when these fade away. This is why we have the idea of imperial ‘golden ages’ of wealth, peace and cultural advances, followed by a descent into ‘dark ages’ marked by violence, poverty and stagnation. Yet this is history through the eyes of elites. Not only does this skew our understanding of the past, but it also shapes how we think about collapse in the present and future.

Many of us know of the brutality of life under empire, although we perhaps underestimate just how bad it could be. Armed men rounding up women to sell them into slavery or public crucifixions are today seen with dismay when done by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq but, as the historian Walter Scheidel observed, these were a normal sight in Rome during its peak. The Roman Empire was also a pyramid scheme that was at war more than 90 per cent of the time between 410 and 101 BCE. In China, the Shang Dynasty sacrificed around 13,000 people over two centuries, and the Qin dynasty killed an estimated 1.5 million people to establish unified rule.

Yet, those who judge human progress only by technological advances and economic growth might believe these grim realities were for the greater good. Empires, in the typical telling, may have been harsh in their punishments and brutal towards their enemies, but also pacified their citizens, ensured security, and hence enabled far greater economic and social prosperity.

But did those citizens actually prosper under empire, and suffer when it vanished?

To answer that question we need to assess the wellbeing of populations thousands of years ago. This is tricky. Medical records are usually absent, and written documents are subjective, but we can get clues from the physical health of people’s bodies. For example, an approach called ‘osteoarcheology’ examines the bones of past people. Bones with fewer lesions (damage from trauma and infections) tend to suggest stronger skeletons, and less exposure to disease and violence. Teeth with fewer holes (caries) tend to suggest a better, less-carbohydrate rich diet. Most importantly, taller people usually mean healthier people, with better diets and less trauma from famine and disease.

Pharaohs and their wives were taller than men and women in the general ancient Egyptian population

Such evidence can shed new light on apparently dramatic collapses. Take the fall of the Late Bronze Age in the Near East and Mediterranean, which offers the archetypal tale of a golden age that descended into a dark age – a story told in popular trade books and various documentaries. In the space of a century or two, the Mycenaeans (the palace-dwelling overlords of Greece) fell apart and gave way to the Greek dark age, the pharaohs of the New Egyptian Kingdom lost power, and the Hittite Empire fractured into a set of squabbling rump states. Yet, despite being called a collapse, it was no apocalypse, nor even an entirely bad thing for citizens.

In Mycenaean Greece, kings were on average 6 cm taller than their peasant counterparts (172.5 cm, compared with 166.1 cm). Similarly, pharaohs and their wives (in a sample of 31 royal mummies) were taller than men and women in the general ancient Egyptian population. Once these empires fell apart, the heights of men began to grow across the Eastern Mediterranean, while the heights of women, which had been increasing slowly, accelerated.

Terracotta female figures, Mycenaean (c1400-1300 BCE). Courtesy the Met Museum, New York

It’s a surprising trend found even in perhaps the most famous imperial golden age of all: the Roman........

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