Casting about for seas I could write about in my next book, a history of seas that had not featured in my earlier ones, I rapidly dismissed the Dead Sea. Nothing lives in its waters (although a couple of micro-organisms have adapted to its soils); it was never, surely, a maritime trade route; its hot and dusty location at the lowest point on earth makes it the closest place to hell, even if, seen from the mountains that surround it, it possesses a bewitching beauty. I could not have been more wrong, as Nir Arielli demonstrates in his fascinating, pioneering and wide-ranging history of this super-salty lake and the basin of land that surrounds it. His book is not strictly a maritime history, in the sense that it does not concentrate on people and boats crossing the Dead Sea. It turns out, however, that people did cross it in times of war and for trade. It had quaysides and ports. Today it is exploited for its enormous mineral resources, so much so that it is at risk of permanently contracting into a series of separate pools.

In Arielli’s hands, the Dead Sea becomes not just a stretch of water but an entire region, with its capital at Jericho. Despite the reference to ten thousand years in the book’s title, Arielli takes the history of this sea back more than 5.3 million years, beginning with the formation of the Levantine Rift Valley. Massive floods and cold periods changed the shape of what would become the Dead Sea, the level of which has risen and fallen throughout history. Ten thousand years ago, the so-called Natufians established settlements close to the Dead Sea, combining hunting with the cultivation of cereals, peas and lentils. Some of them settled on a tell near Jericho, where the British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon uncovered a watchtower, walls and, no less significantly, remains of chickpeas, which are ideally suited to the warm climate and moist soil of this area. Jericho also experienced earthquakes and destruction, apparently by human hands, well before the time when Joshua and the Israelites supposedly sacked the town.

Over time, the sea itself began to acquire religious significance, as another biblical legend, that of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, illustrates. In around 1650 BC an important settlement nearby was destroyed by intense heat that melted pottery and incinerated mud bricks; a current theory attributes this to an