The last quiet season before the fires came.

The Bronze Age port city of Ugarit, on the coast of what is now northern Syria, in the warm summer of 1187 BCE. The streets rise in narrow ashlar lanes toward the temple of Baal. Beneath every house, the family dead sleep in chamber tombs. On the roofs, figs are drying. In the harbour of Minet el‑Beidha, ships still come in from Cyprus and Egypt, and the middens of crushed murex shells gleam white along the shore.

Spend an unhurried evening inside the walls of this small, literate, many‑tongued city, where a weigher of metals carries eight systems of measurement in a cedar box, a young woman kneels at her quern before the first grey light, an old diviner reads the future in clay models of a sheep's liver, and a dyer's household works purple into the creases of their hands. The people of Uga ...