In the world of Covid-19, many city dwellers have felt alienated from the large, crowded, human nests in which, in common with half of the world’s population, they live. As so many urban pleasures – restaurants and shops, theatres and concert halls, universities and museums – became dormant, British newspapers burgeoned with articles about escaping to the countryside. (“The countryside” is a concept that only exists in opposition to the city – pastoral poetry was invented as a literary genre in the third century BC by sophisticated urban Alexandrians exoticising rural life.)

During lockdown, city centres transformed overnight from noisy, infuriating, but purposeful places into unpeopled architectural museums, stone without flesh. As the months drag on, illegal block parties and raves in some British cities are signalling a sense of swelling dissatisfaction, a hint of anomie. Most of us take the functioning of cities for granted most of the time, but under current conditions their basic reliance on what is usually regarded as low-status labour – supermarket employees, delivery drivers, refuse collectors – has become more visible. Cities have seemed a little less familiar, a little more fragile, their inequalities less ignorable. For many, tragically, they have become deadly: it has been urban centres like New York and Madrid that have suffered most grievously from the coronavirus.

It is an interesting time, in short, to be considering a history of ancient cities, the subject of Greg Woolf’s latest book. Woolf is a classicist, but his fascinating and challenging story is not primarily the story of Athens and Rome; still less is it a tour around their famous monuments and architectural wonders. This is, rather, a story of our species’ early brushes with urbanism – an urbanism that started in the fertile crescent in the Middle East in the fourth millennium BC, spread from the Near East to centres such as Crete and Mycenae, retracted significantly in the late bronze age, and then got going again thanks to Phoenicians, Etruscans and Greeks. Rome’s urbanising habit – its foundation of, say, London as an administrative, commercial and strategic capital – is of interest, but it is far from the central concern of the book. Rome was still a village perched above a malarial swamp when the eastern Mediterranean was already a network of cities connected by intricate trade routes.

The key to this book’s approach is in the subtitle – this is not just history, but “natural history”. Woolf draws not just on the written record but on archaeology, demographics, human geography and most intriguingly perhaps, environmental science. He takes the long view, and asks what is it about humans that has caused our species to invent – and constantly reinvent – the city? Why have we done it so relatively recently? What failures might there have been along the way? Why did we do it when we did it? He fights the deeply embedded notion that city-building represents the attainment of some superior phase of human development. The “Bronze Age collapse”, he notes – the period when cities such as Knossos fell, and a 400-year retraction from urban life began – might be reframed not as a relapse into a “dark age”, as it used to be known, so much as a period in which city living, for all kinds of contingent reasons, just didn’t particularly work.

A great deal of labour and many complex processes go into keeping a city going, and did so in the ancient world. (Cities, here, are defined not so much by their size but by the way they work. Whereas villages are dependent on cooperation in similar agricultural skills, cities rely on the complementarity of a whole range of accomplishments from the administrative to the artisanal.) The “dark age” has offered less “stuff” for us to find – fewer fine things traded from afar and a nugatory written record, since writing is first and foremost a useful tool for taking stock of possessions – but they were surely less hierarchical, too. Cities, among other things, are stages on which social distinctions are performed.

Woolf argues that there was no great urban destiny for humans. We do, though, happen to be well adapted for urban life – “accidentally urban”. Our sociability, our extraordinary adaptability to different environments, are crucial. Adopting farming and domesticating animals set us on a path in which urbanism became more and more likely when the circumstances were favourable – which they have turned out to be, over and over again. Cities were not invented once, they were invented many times. Humans ventured into the Americas via Beringia, the land bridge that once connected Siberia and Alaska, around 15,000 years ago. When Beringia was flooded at the end of the last ice age, there was negligible contact between humans on either side of the Atlantic until the conquistadores. And yet when the Spanish encountered Cuzco in what is now Peru, the Inca settlement was immediately recognisable to them as a city, with its temples, piazzas and palaces.

The first city was the Sumerian centre of Uruk, founded in the fourth millennium BC. That city also gave us the first literature, the epic Gilgamesh, which is at least partly about the tension between the wilderness and the city, just as the much later Iliad (written down probably around 700BC) contrasts the domestic, urban virtues of the Trojans with the wholly military male world of the Greek warriors, camped out of the plain, separated from their families, nursing their seething, smouldering rivalries and resentments.

Other cities sprang up in the fertile crescent; then urbanism was invented again in the Nile valley, and again in the Indus valley. The heart of Woolf’s book concerns the comparatively late adoption in the iron age of cities in the Mediterranean. He sees the cities of the Levant and Greece, of southern Spain and France, as interdependent nodes in a great network, as connected to each other as to their immediate hinterlands. He takes apart the notion of “Greek colonisation”, as the proliferation of Greek cities across the Mediterranean – from Anatolia to Sicily to Marseille – has usually been known. “Colonisation” brings with it post-Enlightenment notions of imperial land-grab, which was never part of the deal with these cities. The settlements must almost always, he argues, have been joint ventures, begun in cooperation with local populations, notwithstanding what these cities often claimed about their own ill-remembered origins.

The Life and Death of Ancient Cities is an impressive sweep of a book. Woolf manages to marshal both granular detail while occasionally, necessarily, marking huge change in a single sentence. (“And then came the sail,” he writes, ushering in a whole new era of long-distance marine connectivity, but you will need to read another book to grasp how sailing boats developed.) Does the book tell us anything about our own urban era? There’s a fascinating passage on “urban risk” – threats to cities such as fire, flood, war, earthquakes and, of course, disease. “Weak bodies packed close together are an easy target for many pathogens … the growth of cities and long-distance trade … made it easier to move from one urbanised region to another,” he tells us – as we’ve discovered for ourselves recently. There is more work to be done, he writes, on the extent and effect of these hard-to-recover ancient epidemics; soon analysis of ancient DNA will provide a clearer picture than has hitherto been possible. Taking the long view, Woolf says, cities are parts of systems that rise – and ultimately collapse.

London was abandoned soon after Roman rule ended in AD408, and lay empty for 400 years – but then Alfred the Great found its old walls useful, and a new urban journey began. By the end of the 21st century, Woolf notes, three-quarters of the world’s population may live in a city. They are not a grand human destiny – but they are as natural as coral reefs and termite hills.

• Charlotte Higgins’s Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths is published by Cape. The Life and Death of Ancient Cities by Greg Woolf is published by Oxford University (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.