Two human and animal embalming workshops, as well as two tombs, have been unearthed at the Saqqara necropolis.

Deferred payments for wheat imports are to relieve financial pressures caused by lack of foreign currency, official said

Egypt seemed so close - but Raga Makawi and her relatives were stranded at the border for days after fleeing Khartoum.

Summer is when lovers of books feel freest to read without restraint—lying on a beach, swinging on a porch, or perching on a stoop at the end of a sweaty day. The Atlantic’s writers and editors want to help in this endeavor, and so we’ve selected books to match some warm-weather moods: Maybe you want to transport yourself to another place, or to take a deep dive into one topic. Perhaps you have a yen to feel wonder about the universe or rediscover an old gem. Some readers just want to devour something totally new. Here are 20 books you should grab this season.

Transport Yourself to Another PlaceHeat Waveby Penelope Lively

The pleasure of Heat Wave is its slow, mesmerizing drama. Set in the English countryside over a hot summer, Lively’s slender novel introduces us to Pauline, a divorced editor in her 50s who has opted for an existence “rich in carefully nurtured minor satisfactions.” Among those satisfactions is the freedom she feels in her summer cottage, unleashed from London, her partner, and her office job. Staying next door—and buzzing at a different frequency—are her daughter, Theresa; her son-in-law, Maurice, a smarmy, up-and-coming writer; and their toddler. With a gimlet eye, Pauline observes Theresa’s unhappiness and Maurice’s shifty egotism, the amalgam of repression and delusion that seems to hold their relationship together; as she fixates on them, she thinks back on her own marriage. Lively’s wry prose captures the mundane clarity of Pauline’s life among the wheat fields and the way that a maternal ache, when left to its own devices, can crescendo. Never has a mother-in-law’s judgment seemed so deliciously understated—and so devastating in its conclusion.  — Jane Yong Kim

Toy Fightsby Don Paterson

The Scottish poet Don Paterson is kind of a genius. His poems are ferocious, his critical writings are chatty or witheringly technical or both, and he’s also produced—who does this?—several collections of aphorisms. (“Anyone whose students ‘teach him as much as he teaches them’ should lose half his salary.”) And now a memoir, Toy Fights: It covers God, guitar, origami, breakdown, and Dundee, Scotland, the poet’s hometown, “dementedly hospitable in the way poor towns are,” he writes. It was a place where, once upon a New Romantic time, you could encounter beautiful Billy Mackenzie of operatic popsters The Associates: “He had the attractive power of a 3-tesla MRI scanner, and if there was as much as a paperclip of susceptibility about your person, forget it: you’d find yourself sliding across the room as if you were on castors.” The prose is fizzing-brained, hyperbolic, and it has a hyperbolic effect: It makes you want to delete everything you’ve ever written and start again, this time telling the truth.  — James Parker

Love in Colorby Bolu Babalola

Babalola’s story collection updates and retells romantic myths and fables from a bevy of cultures, tossing a reader into the richly imagined world of characters from Egypt or Nigeria, then sending them to her version of Greece or China. (She also has some fun with history: Here, Queen Nefertiti runs a club-slash-criminal-underworld-headquarters, where she punishes abusive husbands and protects vulnerable women.) The characters and scenarios can feel a tad archetypical, though that is understandable given her source material. But the stories are just fun, and none of them is long enough to drag. Many of them end with a new couple on the precipice of a great adventure. And in each encounter, love is neither an uncontrollable fever that sneaks up on a person, nor an inevitable force that shoves a couple together. It’s a kind of shelter where artifice can be abandoned—the result of careful attention that does away with illusions and misconceptions.  — Emma Sarappo

Friday Blackby Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

My first exposure to Adjei-Brenyah’s work was in a crowded, airless classroom where he read aloud a passage from the title story of his collection, Friday Black: “It’s my fourth Black Friday. On my first, a man from Connecticut bit a hole in my tricep. His slobber hot.” In the scene, the employees of a big-box retailer face down a horde of (literally) rabid shoppers lured by deals that are (again, literally) to die for. Each story in this brutally absurd, original book, Adjei-Brenyah’s debut, similarly whisks the reader somewhere unexpected: an amusement park where customers can legally fulfill violent racist fantasies against Black actors; a courtroom where a George Zimmerman analogue explains why he was justified in murdering children with a chain saw. But these summaries don’t capture the alchemy that Adjei-Brenyah performs. Friday Black presents a warped reflection of our own reality that feels both horrifying and clarifying.  — Lenika Cruz

Take a Deep DiveThe Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Powerby Garry Wills

Come join the cult of Garry Wills, the greatest of all American political journalists. His books smuggle the psychological acumen of a novelist and the insights of a first-rate cultural critic into exegeses of the most familiar figures in American history, whom he somehow interprets anew. The first book that members of his cult will thrust into your hands is Nixon Agonistes. By all means, read it. But in the pleasure-seeking spirit of the season, take The Kennedy Imprisonment and plant yourself under an umbrella. It’s a riveting critique of the first family of 20th-century liberalism, a work that, among other things, scrutinizes the sexual and drinking habits of the Kennedys. Not fixating on Wills’s baser insights is hard. (For example: Jack’s womanizing was born of competition with his father’s philandering. Or: The Kennedys acted more like English aristocrats than Irish immigrants.) But really those are just enjoyable grace notes, because the book is, in the end, a deep essay on that irresistible intoxicant—power.  — Franklin Foer

Travels in Hyperrealityby Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver

Imagine you’re taking a road trip across America—but forgoing the country’s natural splendors for its manufactured ones: Disneyland, wax museums, amusement parks. Oh, and your guide on the journey is an Italian semiotician with a roving intellect and a keen eye for the absurd. That’s Travels in Hyperreality. Eco’s travelogue collects 26 dispatches, mostly written in the 1970s during the author’s visits to the U.S. In the essays, the theorist and novelist plays a classic role: the foreigner who is alternately amused and appalled by American maximalism. (A famously kitschy roadside inn, in Eco’s rendering, resembles “a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli”; Disneyland is “an allegory of the consumer society” whose “visitors must agree to behave like its robots.”) But Eco’s postcards from the past are also infused with insight—and a sense of prophecy. They explore, in technicolor detail, what Eco calls our “faith in fakes.” Travel the country long enough, his trip suggests, and it becomes difficult to tell where the landscape ends and the dreamscape begins.  — Megan Garber

The Last Whalersby Doug Bock Clark

Like an anthropologist determined to get lost in the world of his subject, Clark, a journalist, went to live on a remote Indonesian island in the Savu Sea a decade ago so that he could get as close as possible to the Lamalerans, a tribe of 1,500 people who are some of the last hunter-gatherers on Earth. Their various clans subsist mostly off the meat of sperm whales, when they manage to harpoon and kill the large animals. Clark goes out to sea with them on their hunting boats, becomes emotionally involved in their conflicts, and sees firsthand the way modernity, in the form of cellphones and soap operas, encroaches on their isolated community. In the book, Clark recounts the lives of the Lamalerans with a deep respect, while also spinning a wondrous, thrilling story out of their struggles to balance their traditions with all that entices them to step outside their communal way of life.  — Gal Beckerman

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955by Harald Jähner, translated by Shaun Whiteside

Two of the most unavoidable presences in German life after Hitler were rubble and a disproportionate number of women. Bombarded ruins were everywhere. Cities like Frankfurt that managed to quickly remove them would flourish. Others lived with the mess and stagnated. Women did most of the cleanup, as part of bucket brigades, because of a postwar imbalance in the population—many men never returned home from the front. For every 1,000 German men in 1950, there were 1,362 women. This is the off-kilter society dissected in Jähner’s highly readable cultural history. What makes his book so fascinating—and so poignant—is the relative banality of his subject: a country of one-night stands and wild dance parties, with little recognition of the atrocities it had committed. In fact, Germany largely wallowed in self-pity. Rendered with irony and based on skillful scholarship, Jähner’s book describes both a democratic rebirth and a moral evasion, uncomfortably and inextricably linked.  — F. F.

Feel Wonder About the UniverseFranciscoby Alison Mills Newman

Mills Newman originally published Francisco, based on her life and love affair with her eventual husband, the director Francisco Newman, in 1974; the publisher New Directions rereleased it earlier this year. It’s told by a young Black actor in California, and the eponymous character is her lover, who is obsessively working on a documentary. The narrator is dissatisfied with Hollywood and her career, but she’s hungry for everything else life offers. She is a wise and insightful reader of people, and she and Francisco hang out with a lot of them, up and down the coast of California. Mills Newman’s novel feels like a long party, punctuated by difficult questions: about white standards of beauty, what it really means to be a revolutionary, how to be an artist, and how to be a woman partnered with a man. In the decades since it was published, Mills Newman has become a devout Christian and come to reject elements of the novel. These include, as she mentions in a new afterword, the “profanity, lifestyle of fornication, that i no longer endorse”—adding another layer of complexity to this curious, short book.  — Maya Chung

Elena Knowsby Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle

Elena Knows is a mystery novel, but it’s certainly not a traditional page-turner. It follows the narrator, Elena—a stubborn, cynical 63-year-old woman with Parkinson’s—over the course of a single excruciating day. She’s traveling by train to reach someone she believes can help her find her daughter’s killer, but the journey is near impossible: Even when her medication is working, she can’t lift her head to see where she’s going or walk without great effort. As her pills wear off, she risks being stranded wherever she happens to be at the time. Still, Elena’s not meant to be pitied; she’s flawed and funny and irreverent. (Her name for Parkinson’s is “fucking whore illness.”) Piñeiro’s book is smartly plotted and genuinely suspenseful, but her greatest achievement lies elsewhere: She describes Elena’s minute-by-minute experience so meticulously that I was almost able to comprehend—even just for a moment—the incredible multitude of perspectives that exist in this world at once. And isn’t that the point of fiction, after all?  — Faith Hill

My Menby Victoria Kielland, translated by Damion Searls

The universe is a live wire in the hands of Byrnhild, later called Bella, later called Belle Gunness, in Kielland’s short, electric novel. Her book reimagines the real Gunness, a late-19th-century Norwegian immigrant and early American female serial killer, as a woman overcome by yearning. Belle can’t shut her eyes to the dazzling, splendid world; in Searls’s translation, the thoughts running through Belle’s head are breathless. “All this longing, this dripping love-sweat, it stuck to everything she did,” the narration frantically recounts. From the first pages she craves a blissful obliteration that can be found only through intimacy. After she moves from Norway to the American Midwest, her desire curdles into something more delusional that threatens everyone in her orbit—especially her lovers. Kielland gives readers scarce glimpses of lucidity as the novel takes on the tone of a dream. Belle has “the northern light tangled around her ribs”; she feels “the wet grass grow in her mouth.” Empathy slowly turns to horror, though, as it becomes clear that nothing can fill up the canyon inside her except an ultimate, bloody climax.  — E. S.

The Afterlivesby Thomas Pierce

The Afterlives is set in the near future, in a town full of holograms; the plot involves a haunted staircase, a “reunion machine” meant to reunite the living and the dead, and a physicist who argues that everything in existence is roughly 7 percent unreal. And yet, the protagonist—a 33-year-old loan officer named Jim—is a thoroughly normal guy. Even as the book’s events spin off in strange, supernatural directions, its real focus is on Jim and his developing relationship with Annie, a high-school girlfriend who’s recently been widowed; when they’re offered the chance to try the reunion machine, the story is less concerned with the details of that futuristic technology than it is with Annie’s grief and Jim’s quiet, persistent love for her. No matter how surreal things become, Pierce implies, people will keep moving forward in much the same way, living humdrum little lives together, wondering and hoping in the face of existential mystery. Our desperate curiosity about the afterlife is really about this life, and the people in it we don’t want to give up.  — F. H.

An Old GemMrs. Dallowayby Virginia Woolf

Woolf’s 1925 fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is made for summer reading or rereading, overflowing with vitality. “What a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge!” Clarissa Dalloway thinks as she sets out to buy flowers on a June day in London. An upper-class English woman in her early 50s, she is preparing to throw a party with her husband that evening, not yet aware that two people she once loved passionately will be there. Woolf slips in and out of Clarissa’s consciousness, “tunneling” (her term) into other minds, too, as the day unfolds. The most notable of them belongs to Septimus Smith, a young World War I veteran who hallucinates, hears voices, and speaks of suicide—and yet who is, like Clarissa, a celebrant of life in all its abundance: For him, death offers the only way to preserve his vision of plenitude. Treat yourself to a beautiful supplement as well, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, full of notes, photos, and insights, and edited by the critic Merve Emre. But first, just pick up a paperback and dive into Woolf’s daring experiment to find out whether “the inside of the mind,” as she put it in her notebook, “can be made luminous.”  — Ann Hulbert

Her First Americanby Lore Segal

The originality of this love story between two outsiders in 1950s New York City, Carter Bayoux and Ilka Weissnix, cannot be overstated. Bayoux is a middle-aged Black intellectual, a former United Nations official who seems to know everyone and can opine on every topic; he is also an alcoholic at the bottom of a deep pit. Weissnix is a 21-year-old Jewish refugee from Vienna who can barely speak English when the book begins, unsure if she has been orphaned by the war. The story of their affair is also a story about Ilsa’s American education: She learns from Bayoux how to function at the margins, how to succeed by charming, how never to lose a sense of one’s own distance from the center. The more she grows into her independence, though, the further he sinks, until it’s clear that he can’t be saved even as she begins to build a life of her own.  — G. B.

The Stone Faceby William Gardner Smith

Following the path of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes, a Black American émigré arrives in 1950s Paris to find an existential freedom in the city’s cafés and bars, a space free of white leering and judgment. Simeon Brown, an aspiring painter and the protagonist of Smith’s deeply underappreciated novel, grew up in Philadelphia, where he suffered a brutal racist attack that left him blind in one eye, an incident that haunts him. While abroad, his reprieve from racial animus dissolves when he befriends a group of young Arabs struggling against France’s colonial atrocities in Algeria. These young men see Simeon as benefiting from a kind of whiteness, insofar as he’s free from the racial violence of their state. But Simeon’s Black expat friends believe taking up the Arab cause risks the very freedom they all came searching for. Trapped by a dizzying moral question, Simeon is forced to confront the shifting realities of identity and racial allegiance as he fights the personal demons that have followed him across the ocean.  — Oliver Munday

Hotel du Lacby Anita Brookner

Hotel du Lac is technically a vacation novel. On the page, though, it’s much cooler and more dispassionate than that description implies. When Edith Hope, a 39-year-old romance writer, arrives at a Swiss hotel as fall begins for a period of self-imposed exile, the landscape is gray, the gardens are damp, and everything in her bedroom is “the color of overcooked veal.” Edith has committed a sin that Brookner withholds until midway through. Suffering through dreary evening dinners with the Hotel du Lac’s similarly compromised guests is her uncomfortable penance, until she receives an offer that forces her to think about how she really wants to live. The novel, Brookner’s fourth, drew uncharitable responses after it won the Booker Prize in 1984. But there’s fascinating, bracing tension amid the book’s women, each deemed unfit to be anywhere else: Monica, whose aristocratic husband bristles at her eating disorder; the narcissistic, flamboyant widow Iris Pusey and her stolid daughter, Jennifer; the elderly Madame de Bonneuil, deaf and desperately lonely. Edith can’t quite bond with any of them—she’s too brittle and skeptical for sisterhood—but each woman shades a different kind of existence that throws Edith’s final decision into sharper relief.  — Sophie Gilbert

Devour Something Totally NewThe Guestby Emma Cline

Alex, the protagonist of Cline’s second novel, is an escort in her early 20s, desperate to evade paying both her New York City back rent and a menacing ex-boyfriend to whom she owes an apparently hefty sum of money. She’s been spending time on Long Island’s East End with her much-older boyfriend, Simon, who dumps her shortly after the book begins. But Alex doesn’t want to return to the city, where the only thing that awaits her is her debt. So she whiles away the week until Simon’s Labor Day party, where she plans to win him back. She’s broke, with a busted phone and nowhere to stay; she survives only by taking advantage of everyone who crosses her path. Some of her victims: a group of rowdy young house-sharers, an unstable teenage boy, a lonely young woman who thinks she’s found a new friend. Alex, a blatant (and terrifyingly skilled) user of people, maintains a chilly distance from each of them, even as she sleeps in their beds, eats their food, and takes their drugs. As the novel closes in on the party, Cline creates a feeling of sweaty anxiety—though her protagonist never panics.  — M. C.

Quietly Hostileby Samantha Irby

No one describes the human body quite like Irby. She’s a poet of embarrassment: Her confessional style is frank and unashamed about all of its possible fleshy or sticky causes. (Straightforward lines like “Yes, I pissed my pants at the club” abound.) The discomfiting yet universal phenomena of aging, being ill, and having your body let you down are Irby’s most reliable subjects, and anaphylaxis, perimenopause, and diarrhea all get their moments in Quietly Hostile, her fourth essay collection. But the book is also a receptacle for her wildest dreams, such as what she would say to Dave Matthews if she could meet him backstage, or a self-indulgent meditation on how she would rewrite original Sex and the City episodes (fueled by her time as a writer on its reboot, And Just Like That). When she wants to, Irby can evoke grief without blinking: She recounts, for example, her final, painful, conversation with her mother. But her writing about the great transition from being “young and lubricated” to middle-aged is reliably moving in its own way, and consistently hilarious.  — E. S.

The Wagerby David Grann

The dramatic story of the 18th-century shipwreck of the HMS Wager seems almost ready-made for Grann, the best-selling New Yorker writer famous for dynamic narrative histories, such as his previous book, Killers of the Flower Moon. When the British ship gets shredded traversing the treacherous waves and rocks of Cape Horn on a quixotic mission to search for and plunder enemy Spanish boats, the survivors find themselves stranded on an island off the coast of Patagonia. What happens next can be neatly summed up by the fact that Grann has used a quotation from Lord of the Flies as part of his epigraph. His dogged search through ships’ logs and other contemporaneous accounts of the disaster and its mutinous aftermath has turned up the kind of sterling details that make his writing sing; he is also interested in the way these events were recorded and then recounted, with many different people trying to shape the memory of what happened. Grann simultaneously reconstructs history while telling a tale that is as propulsive and adventure-filled as any potboiler.  — G. B.

The Late Americansby Brandon Taylor

A small, quiet act “had the indifference of love,” Taylor writes near the end of a chapter in The Late Americans. In this scene, a couple is on the outs; they each seem to feed off of needling the other. Yet even as the relationship fissures, Timo makes sure Fyodor gets home safe, driving behind him as Fyodor walks, unsteadily drunk, through the Iowa City night and back to his cold, blank apartment. Their distant togetherness echoes across the novel, where young poets, pianists, meatpackers, and aspiring investment bankers are clumped on and around a university campus, teetering through graduate courses, financial strain, hapless affairs, and the casual dread of not quite knowing their place in the world. The connections between Taylor’s multiple protagonists seem alternately random, doomed, and deeply romantic—much like the conditions that tie them to their creativity, and that keep them moving elliptically, tenderly, toward coming of age.  — Nicole Acheampong

Hamsa Alfaki shares her experience of having to leave her father in Khartoum as she fled for the border with Egypt.

Hovering in the background of ancient history’s headlines is King Juba II—writer, explorer, and ruler of Mauretania, the Roman satellite kingdom in North Africa, for almost 50 years until his death in the early 20s A.D. His skin color is debated (was he light brown? or black?). All we know is that his father was a Berber king in North Africa who supported the wrong side in the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, forged a suicide pact with an ally, and left his infant son to be carted back to Rome and displayed in Caesar’s triumphal victory parade in 46 B.C. The child was then brought up within Rome’s ruling family as something between honored guest, lodger, and prisoner. When he was about 25, the emperor, Augustus, sent him back to North Africa to be king of Mauretania, which extended from modern Algeria west to the Atlantic coast, a buffer state between the Roman empire and the peoples to the south.

The new king seems to have divided his time among the battlefield (there was plenty of “buffering” to be done), the library, and research trips to investigate the flora and fauna of the region. Juba had started writing in Rome (including a history of the city and at least eight volumes on the subject of painting), and in North Africa he produced weighty studies of the region’s geography, history, and culture. He argued, no doubt with a degree of local pride, that the source of the Nile lay in Mauretania, and gave detailed descriptions of the North African elephant. None of his work survives complete, but we have more than 100 extracts quoted by later writers.

Juba’s scientific contributions are his greatest legacy to the modern world. He is not only our best witness to that now-extinct elephant; drawing on his doctor’s name (Antonius Euphorbus), he christened the group of plants still known as Euphorbia (the red-leaved poinsettia is the most easily recognized of these), which was discovered on one of his expeditions into the Atlas Mountains. Chances are he’s behind the name of the Canary Islands too, taken from the big dogs (canes, in Latin) found on one of his expeditions there.

More generally, Juba opens our eyes to all kinds of different perspectives on how Roman power worked. In Rome itself, for example, the royal residences served as a boardinghouse and school for foreign royalty (several other princes and princesses also lodged there). Juba’s Mauretania was one of many “friendly” border kingdoms, where Rome could exert sway from a distance and establish a broad, easily defensible frontier zone—quite unlike the single line usually marked on our modern maps of the empire.

Juba also raises big questions about cultural and ethnic diversity in the Roman world. He was brought to Rome as a baby and reared there. Did he think of himself as Roman or as foreign? Or did he combine those different identities, and adapt them to different circumstances? Is his treatise on North Africa, Libyka, an attempt to define a specifically African history and culture, of which he was a part? Or was it a weapon of Roman imperial control? Most modern empires have used knowledge as a form of power. Systems of geography, history, and even the classification of plants and animals have been imposed as a subtle means of domination. In the ancient world as well, to map meant to own. The 40 or so extracts or paraphrases from Libyka that have come down to us, many of them very brief, were quoted for the scientific “facts” they contain, and give no clue to the underlying ideology.

But in recent years, interest in Juba has been overshadowed by interest in his wife, who went with him from Rome to be queen of Mauretania, and to set up a court in what is now Cherchell, in modern Algeria, a town they called Caesarea. Unlike her husband, she still has an instantly recognizable name: Cleopatra Selene (“the moon”), the only daughter of one of the most notorious, glamorized, and in the end spectacularly unsuccessful couples in Western history: Cleopatra VII, queen of Egypt, and the Roman Mark Antony. She raises just as many questions as Juba does.

How did Cleopatra junior, the daughter of the most famous female enemy Rome ever had, become the wife of a Roman vassal king? How did she negotiate her relationship between the Egypt of her mother and the Rome of her father? And what were her political and cultural ambitions? How did you see yourself if your mother was Cleopatra? A string of contemporary novels and several careful historical analyses (notably by Duane W. Roller) have tried to tell her story from her point of view. The same goal drives a new full-length biography, Cleopatra’s Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen, by Jane Draycott, a lecturer in ancient history at the University of Glasgow.

[From the January 1896 issue: “Cleopatra to the Asp”]

In some ways, Cleopatra’s career mirrors her husband’s. She was born in Alexandria around 40 B.C. Antony was a largely absent father, but when his daughter was about 6, he made the extravagant, though mostly empty, gesture of declaring her queen of Crete and Cyrenaica (on the North African coast), territories that he had no authority to give away. When she was 10 or so, her parents—defeated in their war against Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus—both killed themselves, and she and her brothers, like Juba before them, were taken to Rome, where they appeared in a triumphal procession staged by her parents’ enemies in 29 B.C. According to one ancient account, she and her twin brother, Alexander Helios (“the sun”), walked in the parade next to an effigy of their dead mother. Draycott evokes the experience of being put on show this way by comparing it to the scene of Princes William and Harry walking in procession through London next to their mother’s coffin.

The young Cleopatra grew up in the residence of the imperial family in Rome, before marrying (or being married off to) Juba and moving with him to Mauretania. There she had at least one son, Ptolemaios, who followed his father onto the throne, but came to a nasty end under the Roman Emperor Caligula in 40 A.D. Cleopatra Selene’s own death, commemorated in a surviving poem, has usually been dated to 5 A.D. thanks to an allusion to a lunar eclipse known to have happened that year.

That is the sum of what we know about Cleopatra Selene from ancient written accounts. With scrupulous honesty, Draycott assembles all the references to her in a short appendix, fewer than five full pages long. She hints that we might know more about her if she had been a rebel against the power of Rome, like Boudicca or Zenobia; Cleopatra Selene, Draycott writes, “succeeded quietly rather than failed loudly.” But as it is, decades of her life—most of her adult years, in fact—go completely unrecorded. All we know for sure of her time in Mauretania is that she had a son. Even less information exists about other key characters in her story. Her twin, for example, simply disappears from view after his arrival in Rome. Did he get lucky and find a nice place for a comfortable exile, out of the public eye? Or did he simply die? Draycott enigmatically writes that he “failed to adapt to his change in circumstances.” Others have suspected murder.

The result is a wonderful vacuum for fiction writers to fill. Cleopatra Selene has been given a steamy, star-crossed love affair with Juba in Rome, before the two head off to build a new life in Mauretania. Elsewhere we can read high-stakes political drama. In a trilogy by Stephanie Dray, for example, the young princess is some kind of proto–Egyptian nationalist, battling to recapture the status of her mother, married to Juba against her will, and raped by Emperor Augustus with the active connivance of his wife Livia (echoing the report in one ancient biography that Livia used to groom virgins for her husband). But telling her story in nonfiction, vividly or not, is harder.

Draycott, too, wants to see Cleopatra Selene as a “powerful ruler in her own right,” trying to “fuse her past and present” in a multicultural monarchy that was “new and distinctive in the Roman Empire.” In the absence of any written evidence for that, she turns to archaeology and the material remains from Mauretania and elsewhere. There have been many attempts over the past few decades to find the face of young Cleopatra on cameos and silver dishes. She has even (implausibly) been identified as one of the figures, along with her son, in the procession sculpted on one side of Augustus’s famous Altar of Peace, in Rome. But only on Mauretanian coins do we have images of her that are actually named. One coin depicts Juba on one side, with the title (in Latin) “King Juba, son of King Juba,” and on the other Cleopatra Selene, with the title (in Greek) “Queen Cleopatra, daughter of Cleopatra.” Another coin does not feature Juba at all, but has her head on one side and a crocodile on the other, with the title “Queen Cleopatra” written on both.

For Draycott, these are among the most clinching pieces of evidence for her view of the commanding queen: They show Cleopatra Selene as, at the least, an equal co-ruler alongside her husband, with the authority to mint coins. And they show her using her ancestry and symbols of Egypt as a mark of power. Draycott also imagines her having a hand in Juba’s Libyka and in the royal couple’s “project of laying claim to the entire continent,” which is how she boldly interprets that work.

All of that is possible. But a skeptic might object that having your head on a coin does not indicate that you had the authority to mint (plenty of Roman empresses with no such authority appeared on coins); that queen can just as well mean “wife of the king” as “regnant ruler”; and that every ancient account treats Juba as having sole power. To be sure, that might be because the writers could not accept that a woman was in joint command—but they might also have known what they were talking about. Besides, giving your new capital the aggressively Roman name of Caesarea (“Emperorville”) is an odd choice for a couple with multicultural, almost Pan-African aspirations.

The interpretive debates about what scant evidence there is can go round and round. The fact that I am skeptical does not mean Draycott is wrong. But the arguments point beyond the story of Cleopatra Selene and Juba to the more general problems inherent in undertaking modern biographies of ancient subjects, and raise the question of why we are writing such books. The young Cleopatra may be an extreme case, but there is no character in antiquity (with the possible exception of Cicero, the first-century-B.C. Roman orator, theorist, wit, and letter-writer) for whom we have enough information to create a biography that satisfies the expectations of modern readers and publishers.

To turn written evidence that fills fewer than five pages into a 256-page account, Draycott uses well-established tactics. She offers a lot of fascinating context and background to add bulk. Her chapters on the culture of Alexandria and on Egyptomania in Rome are excellent and accessible, but they help us relatively little with Cleopatra Selene herself. She projects a few familiar modern anxieties onto her ancient characters: She wonders at one point about Juba’s “midlife crisis.” And to bolster what is necessarily a fragile narrative, she liberally sprinkles would have s and must have s through her text, occasionally up to five or six times on a single page (she “would have been highly educated,” “it would have been terrifying,” and so on). Most modern biographies of ancient Romans, when they don’t simply assume that we know things we do not, adopt this “would have” brand of storytelling. It makes for an awkward narrative.

Draycott is well aware of these issues. She starts the book by asking, “How does one dare to attempt to write a biography of any ancient historical figure?” But she has powerful reasons for trying to reconstruct Cleopatra Selene’s life story. As she explains, she wants young women of color to be able to identify with the queen, whom she sees as an inspiring model for them and for the rest of us—a figure who “successfully wielded power … when women were marginalised,” and when she herself was an outsider in so many ways.

I hope that I am as keen as Draycott that classics as a discipline should find ways of engaging with diverse communities and also being enriched by them. And she is admirably judicious on the controversial question of whether Cleopatra, mother or daughter, was in our terms Black (answer: We don’t know). But I am suspicious in general of finding exemplary figures for our own times in the distant past. After all, one of the things that we now rightly find problematic about the 19th-century study of classics was that elite white men did claim to see themselves in the ancient world, and they presented antiquity in their own image, not as a strange and different place. It doesn’t help us understand either the ancient world or ourselves to supplant one set of such role models with another. More than that, to hold up as an ideal for today’s young people a woman about whom we know next to nothing is to promote fantasy over fact.

[From the May and June 1892 issues: Private life in ancient Rome: Part I] and Part II

Historians should certainly try to uncover the forgotten women of classical antiquity, and to spot those whose strength has been overlooked. Sometimes that has been done with great success. The ancient account, for instance, of the martyrdom of Perpetua—a young Christian woman put to death in North Africa in the early third century A.D.—has been given new life in the past few decades, after centuries of being scarcely noticed by historians. The neglect was extraordinary, given that Perpetua left us her own words, preserved in her prison diaries, describing her trial and imprisonment: a rare example of a woman’s voice surviving from the Roman empire.

But understanding how women in the ancient world were silenced is equally important. What social mechanisms and cultural assumptions help explain why those who may have claimed some power were overlooked—or, alternatively, demonized? Cleopatra senior is a good case of vilification, and so is Augustus’s wife Livia, who was blamed for almost every death within the palace walls. In the end, for the historian, unearthing the reasons we know so little about Cleopatra Selene—probing into who wrote her out of the story, and how—is a more instructive project than reinventing her to fit our own template of power. My question is, why do we know more about Juba’s elephants than about his wife?

This article appears in the June 2023 print edition with the headline “Who Was Cleopatra’s Daughter?”

There has been a third day of bloodshed, mourning and intense fighting as the Israeli air force targeted leaders of Islamic Jihad in their homes while Palestinians responded with rocket barrages.

Photographs by Alex Majoli

At the Vatican Museums, the nightly ritual of the keys begins in Room 49A, a tight, windowless chamber, generally referred to as il bunker, which I entered one evening last November from a grassy courtyard as rain began to fall. The keeper of the keys—the clavigero—is a former member of the carabinieri named Gianni Crea. He has a staff of about a dozen, and keeps nearly 3,000 keys in the bunker. Can he match each one to a lock? At the Vatican, yes, he said; he has trouble at home. Some keys, like No. 401, which weighs a pound and opens the main interior door to the oldest of the museum buildings, were forged centuries ago; others resemble keys you’d find in a hardware store or a kitchen drawer. Many have plastic tags with handwritten labels. They open every utility box, every window, every gate and portal.

The heavy bronze doors at the museums’ main entrance are pulled shut every afternoon at 4 p.m. and locked with a key numbered 2,000. Over the next two hours, until the exit doors are also closed, the last visitors proceed through the hallways. Behind them, here and there, lights begin to dim. Metal detectors power down. At the glassed-in security station in the Atrium of the Four Gates, departing guards punch time cards. Behind the glass, alongside a crucifix and a photograph of Pope Francis, a flatscreen presents live images from security cameras. The screen gives the enclosure a quiet glow.

Each sector of the museum has its own large key ring, the kind carried by a jailer. On this night, when the last of the visitors had gone, Crea piled a tangle of keys on the counter of the security station, then handed out key rings to his staff. The lockdown got under way. He kept a larger set of keys for himself, so that he and I could make our way anywhere.

Before leaving the bunker, Crea had taken a key from an envelope. The flap, now torn, bore his signature and had been stamped with the papal coat of arms. He had picked up the key that morning from a command post at the Porta Sant’Anna, one of the Vatican gateways, and would return it shortly before midnight. He handed the key to me, gesturing to a tiny, unmarked vault in the wall of the bunker. I opened the vault and found another key. If Lewis Carroll had invented a nuclear-launch protocol for the Holy See, this might have been it. The key in the vault was the key to the Sistine Chapel.

I HAD COME OFTEN to the Vatican Museums ever since a first visit when I was in grade school. Over the years I had written about some of the museums’ activities, and on several occasions had met with the director, the art historian Barbara Jatta. But I had long wanted to experience the museums in a different way: to wander the four and a half miles of hallways after the doors close and to be there in the early hours before the doors open; to explore the collection—the 20,000 sculptures and paintings and other works on display—as night settles over Rome and the galleries adjust to a quieter state of being. A few months ago, I got my wish: The Vatican Museums agreed to let me spend most of a night inside and to go wherever I wanted. I would always be in the company of the clavigero and of another member of the staff, by turns Matteo Alessandrini, the head of the press office, and a colleague, Megan Eckley, both of whom I knew well. Not unusually, Matteo represents a second generation with a Vatican calling. His father, Costanzo, had served Pope John Paul II as a personal bodyguard.

The nightly lockdown begins: Gianni Crea at the central security station, Atrium of the Four Gates (Alex Majoli / Magnum / Vatican for The Atlantic)

The Vatican Museums—there are many separate units—occupy what is essentially a rectangle. To the north, the Belvedere Palace, which began life as a 15th-century papal villa, lies hard against Vatican City’s massive walls. To the south, near St. Peter’s Basilica, a quarter of a mile away, is the Sistine Chapel. Two long loggias link north to south and form the rectangle’s sides. The space these buildings enclose is divided into courtyards.

We decided to start the evening where the museums themselves had started, in the Belvedere Palace. The creators of what are now the Vatican Museums, half a millennium ago, were driven by a radical change in perspective. For centuries, the bountiful supply of ancient statuary unearthed in Rome had been burned for lime to make mortar. With the revival of classical learning, Renaissance popes began to preserve the marble instead, putting the best pieces on display in the Belvedere’s Octagonal Courtyard. The collection grew and the mission broadened. In time, visionaries such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Antonio Canova created something like a modern museum. It remains modern in its scholarship and expertise, and in many of its operations.

But it is also the world’s oldest major museum, and, as Jatta emphasizes, a spiritual dimension is part of its mission. Some precincts are consecrated space. The gift shops sell more rosaries than anything else. The original buildings were meant for the personal use of the pope, and in places encompass a confusing warren of small rooms and narrow staircases that were never intended to receive 7 million visitors a year. The scale of the Vatican Museums can be hard to comprehend—20 acres of wall space—and the task of renewal and conservation is perpetual. Masonry subsides and cracks. Frescoes fade. Roofs leak. Only four spaces have air-conditioning. The museum complex is not a static object. It is an organism, and life flows through it.

[Read: An American art critic’s 70-year love affair with Rome]

Earlier in the day, I had stopped in to see Marco Maggi, the head of the conservator’s office. His job comes with a pedigree—the first person to hold it was appointed in 1543. The office oversees the various restoration laboratories but its primary responsibility is to keep materials from deteriorating in the first place—statues and paintings, to be sure, but also mummy linens, Roman glass, medieval parchment, Renaissance tapestries, and items made of bronze or bone, feathers or sealskin. Reflecting on the biography of every object—the unique journey each has made to this place across miles and years— Maggi repeated an observation he’d once heard, and that stayed with me all night. “Time,” he said, “is an emotion.”

THE IDEA THAT A MUSEUM comes alive at night—that works of art themselves might relax and chat when people are not there—animates movies and novels and children’s books. And there is a sort of truth to the idea: After hours, life goes on. As we set out among the galleries, faint noises from the ceiling called attention to a skylight. Workers above could be heard talking as they washed the exterior, their movements backlit like those of puppets in a shadow play. Elsewhere, cleaners with soft brushes in their hands and vacuum cleaners strapped to their backs gently dusted imperial Roman statues—an animal’s claws, an athlete’s thighs, an emperor’s beard. In a conservation laboratory set among exhibits, technicians in white coats worked late, repairing the frayed edge of a woven artifact from Africa.

The museums at night can feel like an elaborate play structure: gilded corridors the length of a football field, rooms teeming with a stone zoo of lions and crocodiles and other marble creatures, darkened galleries and countless places to hide. Every door conceals a surprise. In the Belvedere Palace, the clavigero unlocked a gate that gave access to a tower encasing the Bramante staircase, a spiral ramp named for the chief architect of Pope Julius II. It is a double helix—people can ascend and descend without crossing paths—and large enough to accommodate a papal carriage, as it once had to do. The staircase links the lofty interior of the palace to an exterior private entrance far below. We stepped outside, at ground level, into a downpour. A fountain in the shape of a galleon sprayed jets of water from masts and cannons, as if trying to fight off the weather. Back upstairs, the Octagonal Courtyard was dimly lit and open to the sky. Rain glazed a ring of sarcophagi and pelted a central pool. Some of the Vatican’s original treasures are still here. One alcove frames the ancient statue known as Laocoön. I moved a velvet rope aside and walked behind the statue, and was surprised to find an object affixed to the base: a lone marble arm.

Laocoön was the man who tried to warn his fellow Trojans about that gift of a wooden horse. Angry, one of the gods sent serpents to strangle Laocoön and his sons—the moment captured in marble. The sculpture, from the first century B.C., had been unearthed in a vineyard near the Colosseum in 1506—Michelangelo was present for the excavation—and became the nucleus of the Vatican collection. But bits were missing, including the father’s right arm. Could the arm be restored?

Restoration was once standard practice; along with fig leaves, classical statues gained hands, noses, and entire limbs made from plaster or marble. As recently as a few decades ago, souvenir-seekers might snap off a plaster finger, leaving a trace of white dust on the floor.

Left: The Niccoline Chapel, inside the Apostolic Palace, with frescoes by Fra Angelico. Right: The statue of Laocoön in the Octagonal Courtyard, the nucleus of the Vatican Museums. (Alex Majoli / Magnum / Vatican for The Atlantic)

To restore Laocoön, the pope’s architect held a competition, appointing Raphael as judge. Eventually an arm was added, slightly bent but reaching upward—the version preserved in countless copies. Michelangelo was skeptical; an experienced anatomist, he inferred that Laocoön’s arm must have been angled sharply behind his head. Four hundred years later, a big piece of the missing limb was discovered. Michelangelo had been right. The original arm was reattached. The discarded arm was left behind the statue, where on a rainy night the beam of a flashlight picked it out.

A museum loses something when visitors are gone: People are part of the display. But it gains something in return. In the emptiness of night, you become acutely aware of your physical senses. Eyes adjust to changing gradations of light. Black windows become mirrors. Shadows dance at light’s command: Projected on a wall, marble stallions pulling a Roman chariot seem to rear in anger; an unfinished angel by Bernini in clay and wire becomes even larger and hovers protectively over a Caravaggio. Faint smells come into their own. A whiff of paint lingers in a room that has been newly restored. A scent of candle wax pervades a papal chapel. The acoustic environment is unexpected. Every sound creates an echo—voices, footsteps, keys, raindrops. The high-low wail of a siren from the city outside seems impossibly remote. There is an urge to touch, to run a hand across surfaces like the underside of a Raphael tapestry, whose filaments of golden thread give the appearance of a circuit board.

Without the bustle, I was aware of another sense too, a kind of sixth sense: a consciousness of actual lives bound up with whatever I was looking at. In the Pinacoteca, the picture gallery, we passed Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint Jerome; Leonardo’s fingerprint was clearly visible in a patch of blue-green sky. A few rooms away, lit up and richly colored in an otherwise darkened space, Raphael’s The Transfiguration might have been a stained-glass window. It was easy to see why this place had been chosen for a memorial Mass, a few weeks earlier, recognizing staff members who had died or suffered loss in the previous year. On the same floor, in the older rooms of the Belvedere Palace, the presence of Michelangelo was inescapable: A visitor sees what he would have seen. Michelangelo came to this place to study the Belvedere Torso, a marble dating to the first century B.C. He thought of the torso—its arms missing, its legs cut off at the knees—as his “teacher” and used the taut anatomy in his portrayal of Adam on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. In an adjacent room stands a basin, carved from a single slab of imperial porphyry, that may once have graced Emperor Nero’s Golden House. It is said that Nero and his wife used to bathe in it, a detail I pass along understanding that It is said, a staple phrase in Rome, generally means “Don’t look too closely.” But ordinary people are also reflected in the basin’s history. The porphyry, weighing half a ton, had been quarried in Egypt. Hundreds of lives were invested in hauling and floating it to Rome. It would not have been an easy task.

There was not a living soul in the gleaming straightaway of the Chiaramonti loggia, which extends south from the Belvedere Palace, and yet it was full of life. Marble heads of ancient Romans are arranged side by side on tiers of shelves that stretch for 100 yards. Some are idealized renderings of gods and emperors. Some are busts of people one might actually have known. They capture receding hairlines, double chins, unfortunate fads in coiffure; they capture pride, love, vanity, sadness. The names of many of these men and women have been lost. In some cases, all that is certain is a place of origin and a date, along the lines of Syria, 1st Century B.C. or Dacia, 3rd Century A.D. But the individuality of the features, the imprint of personality, is too strong to ignore. I could imagine these people suddenly alive, marble becoming flesh, eyes blinking in surprise. Their expressive faces send a message that recalls an inscription in Rome’s Capuchin ossuary: What You Are Now, We Once Were.

The shadow of a stallion comes between a discus thrower and the god Hermes in the Hall of the Chariot. (Alex Majoli / Magnum / Vatican for The Atlantic)

Among the 1,000 pieces of sculpture in the loggia, two busts were gone, their absence as obvious as missing teeth; all that remained were ragged circles marking where the bases had been fixed to a shelf. A few weeks earlier, an American tourist had told a guard that he needed to see the pope. Informed that a meeting was not possible, he had knocked the two busts to the floor. One of them—Veiled Head of an Old Man—lost part of his nose and an ear. The bust is being repaired, but this old Roman, whoever he was, will forever bear the marks of an encounter in 2022.

[From the May 1996 issue: Backlogs of history]

The Vatican Museums employ undercover personnel known as volanti, who walk among the crowds. But incidents still occur. In August, climate protesters from an organization called Last Generation glued their hands to the base of Laocoön. (A few weeks earlier, the same group had splashed pea soup on Van Gogh’s The Sower, also in Rome.) The Vatican has a court system but few jail cells. The Laocoön perpetrators were remanded to Italy, a few yards away.

The American tourist who knocked over the busts likewise found himself in Italian custody. Word of the incident spread quickly. When Barbara Jatta saw Pope Francis at an event not long afterward, his first words to the museums’ director were “Who was that poor man?”

We left ancient Rome behind and headed for the newest part of the museums—the Anima Mundi gallery, devoted to works from beyond the Western world. The route to the gallery led past a terrace that looked out across the Vatican gardens to the dome of St. Peter’s and the misty silhouettes of umbrella pines. The dome was lit gently, except for the blazing lantern atop its crown. Antonio Paolucci, a former director of the museums, used to say that the best time to view the dome at night would have been centuries ago, when only the moon gave illumination. Electric lighting, he felt, made the lantern look like a birthday cake. Tonight, in the wet air, it wore a halo.

I was not prepared for the beauty of the Anima Mundi gallery—a sleek, modern space the size of a small warehouse. The gallery was dark but the collection was revealed in illuminated vitrines that arose like glass meeting rooms in an open-plan office. Many of the objects had been gifts to popes. Father Nicola Mapelli, the director of the gallery, walked among objects he especially loves: funerary poles and wandjina rock art from Australia; a ritual mask from Tierra del Fuego; a red-eyed, black-skinned Madonna and Child from New Guinea.

Museum officials sometimes speak of Anima Mundi as “the next Sistine Chapel,” and a big part of the museums’ future. Most of the Church’s growth is outside Europe and North America. Of course, the existing Sistine Chapel remains a big part of the future too. We made our way toward the chapel and the Raphael Rooms, at the far end of the rectangle. Pausing by a window, Matteo Alessandrini pointed to the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery, on the Vatican grounds. The time was about 10 o’clock, and a single room was lit—the salone of the pope emeritus, Benedict XVI. He had only a month to live.

Left: The Sistine Chapel. To the left of the altar, under Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, stands the door to the Room of Tears. Right: Father Nicola Mapelli and lab technicians working after hours at the conservation laboratory in the Anima Mundi gallery. (Alex Majoli / Magnum / Vatican for The Atlantic)

A few moments later, Matteo indicated a small handle in a frescoed wall and pulled out a thin rectangle of masonry. Behind it was a pane of glass, embedded in the wall centuries ago as an early-warning system: Cracked glass would mean the building had begun to subside. I reached in with a finger. We were okay for now.

In the Raphael Rooms—four chambers that Raphael covered with frescoes in what were once a suite of papal apartments—heavy wooden shutters had been closed against the night, but an open window was still reflected in the polished shield of a figure on an opposite wall: a trompe l’oeil joke by the artist. Gouges in the walls are still visible, the work of soldiers with pikes during the Sack of Rome in 1527. Raphael had been painting the last of these four rooms, the Room of Constantine, when a fever carried him off. Graffiti, centuries old, has been scratched into its lower walls: fu fatto papa pio iv, someone wrote, noting the election of a new pontiff. That was in 1559.

From the Raphael Rooms, the Sistine Chapel was only a few staircases away. Its most striking aspect, when you enter alone and in weak light, is not the frescoed ceiling but the sheer expanse of floor. During the day, when the room is packed with people, all looking up, the floor disappears. Once, years ago, lifted toward the chapel’s ceiling in the basket of a cherry picker, I had the chance of a bird’s-eye view. But I naturally looked up, and not at the five-story drop.

Now, late in the evening, after Gianni Crea turned the key and pulled the knob, an expanding trapezoid of light from the hallway behind us illuminated the intricate marble inlay ahead.

An axis of braided circles ran down the length to the altar, the effect dynamic and yet placid. This is the tessellated floor that Michelangelo would have known—the one that received any droppings of paint that missed the scaffolding or his face. It’s the floor Raphael would have walked on when (it is said) he took advantage of Michelangelo’s absence from Rome to sneak a look at the work in progress. The chapel would not be cleaned until morning, but as lights came on I saw little in the way of litter—unusual in a room that as many as 25,000 people walk through every day. The explanation may simply be the power of this place, its sacral nature. People do leave prayers. I found a folded slip of paper on the masonry bench that runs along the walls, saw what it was, and put it back.

[From the June 1999 issue: The mirror of Dorian Gray]

Free of distraction, you have a chance to notice details—for instance, the spots high on the walls where Michelangelo was unable to paint, because his scaffolding got in the way. Or how the plane of The Last Judgment leans forward, as if to convey active urgency; the slant is obvious at the join, where the front wall meets the sidewalls. Digital sensors, visible once you look for them, collect data from all parts of the chapel. They monitor temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, and particulates, as well as the size of the crowd. The data are tracked on screens in the conservator’s office; we likely produced a blip just by opening the door and turning on a light. The Sistine Chapel is one of those few air-conditioned spaces in the Vatican Museums. The air in the room can be exchanged as often as 60 times a day. If need be, the volume of traffic can be reduced by controllers upstream. They can close doors and loop throngs into a detour, or encourage exploration. People should know about Etruscan art anyway. But the chapel never fully shakes off its millions of annual visitors—their dust, their heat, their coughs and sneezes.

Those visitors arrive through a single entrance and leave through a single exit. But there are additional doors—another thing you notice when the room stands empty. The Sistine Chapel is part of the Apostolic Palace, the official papal residence, and some doors, usually locked, lead directly into private areas. Late in the evening, an elderly priest came through the double doors in the wall farthest from the altar, perhaps drawn by light seeping underneath them at an odd hour. We were invited into the Sala Regia, an ornate hall in the Apostolic Palace where popes once received royalty, and then into the Pauline Chapel, where cardinals celebrate Mass before a papal conclave begins. It is also a private chapel for the pope. There was to be a funeral here the next morning for a dignitary identified only as un diplomatico. Michelangelo’s last paintings dominate the sidewalls of the chapel—The Conversion of Saul and The Crucifixion of Saint Peter. Peter is shown being crucified upside down, as tradition says he was. But the head is torqued, lifting off the cross so that Peter can see into the room. His dark eyes followed me all the way down the center aisle, and all the way back.

Later, another door opened, near the Sistine Chapel’s altar, and a man stood silhouetted in a bright rectangle: He was standing at the entrance to the Room of Tears. Immediately upon election, a new pope takes refuge here in order to reflect on the weight thrust upon him, and to change into a white cassock. The man in the doorway, its custodian, allowed us in.

On a wall in the Pinacoteca, the picture gallery, Caravaggio’s Deposition and the specter of a Bernini angel (Alex Majoli / Magnum / Vatican for The Atlantic)

It is a suite, not a single room. The vestibule holds a red plush Victorian love seat. White cassocks in various sizes hang on a rack in the room beyond; one of them should fit any newly elected pontiff well enough. A final room contains a small wooden desk bearing a nameplate from the most recent conclave: Bergoglio, the surname of Pope Francis. On a shelf nearby sit boxes labeled bianca and nera—chemical additives used to produce white or black smoke during a conclave, after each vote. In the vestibule, the custodian pointed to an alcove sheltering a waist-high antique cabinet. Did we know what it was? With a flourish, he opened the cabinet to reveal a commode, the oval seat upholstered in rich red leather.

The Vatican Museums go dark for everyone before midnight. It was 11 p.m., and time to leave. The lights in the Sistine Chapel were extinguished, and the door swung shut. A quarter of a mile later, Crea returned the chapel’s key to its vault. Alarms were set. Outside, Crea locked the museums’ back entrance and put the key to the vault (in a freshly sealed envelope, signed and stamped) and the key to the back door into a zippered pouch. This he deposited at a command post on his way out of the city-state. Until about 5 a.m., no one would be inside.

I would see the Sistine Chapel once more. Two hours before dawn, as the rain tapered off, the gates of the Porta Sant’Anna swung open for Crea’s BMW. One of the Swiss guards at the gate saluted and then bent to the window. The guardsmen wore not the ceremonial uniform of red, blue, and yellow but the deep-blue service uniform, still with a Renaissance flair—breeches, knee socks, tunic, beret. Instead of swords, the guards carried sidearms. They were young and fit, and looked capable of a kinetic response to Stalin’s mocking question “How many divisions has the pope?” The car was waved through.

We stopped at the command post to pick up the pouch, then drove farther into Vatican City. The car crossed a courtyard, passed under a building, made some sharp turns, and came out amid the Vatican gardens alongside a road that leads to the back entrance of the museums. This is the route typically taken by guests of the Holy See’s secretary of state and by certain other visitors. French President Emmanuel Macron had recently come this way. A year earlier, Kim Kardashian, arriving with Kate Moss, had created a stir, wearing what appeared to be a spray-on white doily; she had to put on a long coat before being allowed to enter the Sistine Chapel. Members of the staff still spoke about that visit. (Moss, they said, had been lovely.)

When other guards arrived, Crea unlocked the entrance. Inside, switches were flicked. The security station glowed once more. Tutto okay? one of the men said into a phone—a routine call to the central office of the governatorato, the Vatican’s city hall, which manages the alarm system. Yes, everything was okay. Crea began handing out rings of keys. He himself took No. 401 and proceeded to the double doors that give entry to the Belvedere Palace. Using both arms, he pulled them open.

We meandered along the Gallery of the Tapestries. The hall was dark, but a flashlight framed the risen Christ in a bright circle. We arrived once more at the Sistine Chapel. The door to the Sala Regia opened briefly, revealing a flash of color: Swiss guards stood smartly in ceremonial uniforms, helmets catching the light—an honor guard for the diplomat’s funeral. The counterpoint in the chapel was a red-haired woman in a white smock, armed with a bucket, a broom, and a mop.

She worked with propulsive energy, first wiping down the altar and then sweeping 6,000 square feet of marble floor. I introduced myself; her name was Barbara and her grip was strong. She said she cleaned not only the chapel but also the stairs leading to and from it, and the toilets nearby and some of the laboratories. The chapel took her an hour; some of her supplies were kept behind the altar. She liked starting every day like this, and explained why with an arc of her arm that took in the ceiling. The contents of her dustpan confirmed the scarcity of litter: six small museum tickets, a handful of tissues, a couple of candy wrappers, a scrunchie. When her sweeping was done, Barbara opened a wooden cabinet against a wall and wheeled out a machine resembling a small Zamboni. Pushing it by hand, she polished the entire floor. The triumphant figure of Christ in The Last Judgment seemed protective, watching over Barbara as she worked. I knew that the figure’s torso had been based on that of Laocoön, but saw now that the right arm was angled over his head, as Michelangelo knew it should be, not raised above. He had made his point.

The recently restored Room of Constantine, the chamber Raphael was working on when he died (Alex Majoli / Magnum / Vatican for The Atlantic)

The museums’ doors would soon be opening. The hallways had begun to awaken. Guards passed by in twos and threes. Salespeople unloaded boxes from carts: fresh supplies of guidebooks and rosaries, key chains and plush toys. An aroma of espresso trailed from a break room. Near the gates, metal detectors blinked on. Outside, below the Vatican’s high walls, the colored flags of tour guides poked above the crowd.

We sought higher ground, climbing to a terrace that overlooks the Cortile della Pigna, the Pinecone Courtyard. The view, Barbara Jatta told me, had made this terrace a favorite spot: It offers a panorama of the Vatican and all of Rome. The storm had passed. A thin haze lay over the city, pierced by domes and towers. The sun, low above the Alban Hills, was on the verge of breaking through.

I was conscious of the way the various cogs of a museum’s life turn at different rates. The slow, unending process of accretion over centuries. The biography, sometimes tortuous, of every object. The cyclical flood of visitors. The start-and-stop progress through a gallery. And the sudden spark of provocation, when something you see triggers a thought or a memory—a long-ago visit here with a parent, a moment of love or friendship, an inexplicable vibration of the spirit. In that instant, a museum exists for the visitor alone. I had been carrying around Marco Maggi’s words like a riddle—“Time is an emotion”—even as the meaning fell into place.

This article appears in the June 2023 print edition with the headline “Night at the Vatican.”

The hostilities amount to the heaviest fighting between the two sides in months.

Does climate change directly influence the weather we experience? Until recently—for the past 40 years or so—that question has followed nearly every major hurricane or flood, every record snowfall or heat wave. In some people, it provokes instant denial, often political or economic, often rooted in prideful ignorance. But the question raises a genuine analytical issue: How do we determine the effect of incremental, global atmospheric change on locally transient weather systems? And how do we assess the effect that those systems—and the climate shifts underlying them—have had on human societies in the past? These are complicated questions. Now imagine trying to answer them throughout the whole of history, from the origin of our species to the day before yesterday. That’s the task the Oxford historian Peter Frankopan undertakes in The Earth Transformed: An Untold History.

Consider, for instance, what has come to be called the Little Ice Age, a period of sharply lower temperatures from (roughly) the 16th to the early 19th centuries. The term first appeared in 1939 in a report from the glaciers committee at the American Geophysical Union, and, as Frankopan notes, it “became popular with historians and general readers alike.” But was the Little Ice Age real? The idea of a prolonged era of sustained colder weather has evoked a kind of climate determinism, a tendency to blame human behavior in, say, the 17th century mainly on the temperature. The Little Ice Age has been used to explain any number of things: a sudden abundance of melancholy, “the growing popularity of beer,” the shift from open fireplaces to tiled stoves in Sweden, more clouds and darkness in paintings from the period, an “astonishing” increase in the persecution of women, even the gales that destroyed the Spanish Armada.

Frankopan acknowledges that this period was “a time of profound social, economic, political and ecological change.” But an abundance of data indicates that there was nothing climatically coherent or globally synchronous going on—nothing remotely like an ice age, not even a little one. The conclusion, drawn from “marine-core data, sea-ice incidence and ice-core isotope records,” is that there’s almost no evidence for a “climatically distinct and clearly cooler” Little Ice Age. On this, Frankopan, many climatologists, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agree. The very idea of a sudden, global, uniform, and extended cold spell also goes against common sense. The Little Ice Age is supposed to have lasted several centuries. But, as Frankopan reminds us, we won’t discern “any consistency across either time or space” in a period that long. This can be hard to remember.

The best corrective to denial and determinism is accurate climate data. The more we have, the better we can assess the pattern and scale of past climatic variations and their effects. As Frankopan routinely notes in The Earth Transformed, climate contributes as often as it causes. Famine in seventh-century China, for example, was begun by drought but worsened by inept rulers, a pattern repeated again and again throughout history. “Even where connections seem both plausible and compelling,” Frankopan writes, “identifying the precise relationship between environmental and societal changes requires caution.” He refuses to generalize beyond the evidence and is scrupulous—almost testy—about the quality of the evidence he uses. (My favorite demurrer: “if data that is geographically and chronologically uneven is to be believed.”) From time to time, Frankopan may sound as though he’s debunking the argument that climate has helped determine the shape of human history. But he’s really refining it, giving it greater authority based on better evidence.

The question is no longer whether climate change can influence the scale and force of an individual hurricane or typhoon. Of course it can. We see it happening as storms intensify all around us. Global warming is affecting nearly every Earth system, including polar-ice conditions, monsoon cycles, ocean temperature, and the dynamics of the major ocean currents and oscillations. It’s bringing an end to what the poet Marianne Moore once called “the unegoistic action of the glaciers.” What use is history in this context? What is there to learn from episodes of the distant past, such as the 15th-century Famine of One Rabbit in what is now Mexico and the sixth-century floods described by Gregory of Tours?

[Read: The way we talk about nature is getting weirder]

Frankopan’s purpose in The Earth Transformed isn’t to explain how we find ourselves where we are climatically or to chronicle the steady increase of atmospheric carbon and our failure to curtail it. The book is doing something different. Frankopan presents an enormous panoply of cultures and societies affected by widely differing climatic pressures. He uses a wealth of new climate data and huge advances in climate modeling to understand “the role that climate has played in shaping the history of the world,” to retell history as if it were something more than the interactions of humans on a weather-less planet.

Here are two examples. Around the year 540, a major cluster of volcanic eruptions shrouded the Earth in dust, dimming the sun, causing temperatures to plummet, and decimating human populations. (One expert called these “the coldest decades in the Holocene.”) Seven hundred years later, in the early 13th century, Mongolia experienced the wettest conditions in more than 1,000 years. Extra moisture increased pasturage and allowed “enormous increases in the size of livestock herds, above all of horses.” On those horses and their progeny, Ghengis Khan and his hordes were mounted. One of these events is global; the other isn’t. It’s worth noting that neither contributed to a steadily worsening set of interactive environmental conditions of the kind that threaten us now. Neither was part of an intensifying feedback loop like the one we’re living in, which is continuous, cumulative, and global.

At the very least, it’s chastening to see how other humans in other times responded to the dynamic Earth systems in which their lives were embedded, chastening too to see how often climatic events tyrannized daily existence. But what can those episodes tell us about how we should respond to our likely fate? Here is how Frankopan explains the rationale behind The Earth Transformed: “As a historian, I know that the best way to address complex problems is to look back in time.” History, he adds, “can also teach valuable lessons that help formulate questions and sometimes even answers relating to some of the big issues that lie ahead of us.” I’m not questioning the value of writing history, of course. But “lessons,” “questions,” “answers,” “issues”—these are anodyne words, like “food for thought for the present and future.” They’re reminders that it may not be the historian’s job to detail the lessons or discover the answers. That’s up to us.

There’s no seceding from history. The present is both the future of the past and the past of the future. Environmental changes have been and will be shaped, Frankopan writes, “by what has already happened in the past, rather than simply by decisions made today.” In the second century B.C., the Greek historian Polybius observed that the past once consisted “‘of a series of unrelated episodes.’” But now, Polybius wrote, “‘history has become an organic whole,’” a conclusion that seems far truer in the 21st century than it was 2,200 years ago. And yet, climate change—which binds us all together in a common fate—creates an inescapable feeling that the present has become discontinuous from the past, like an ice shelf breaking free of Antarctica. Frankopan’s final summary of the present state of global warming is unflinching. It should instill in the reader a deep sense of humility, making it easier to grasp how much we resemble the humans who preceded us, no matter how ancient or unfamiliar they are. If The Earth Transformed has a moral, I think it’s this: We’re as foolish and catastrophically inattentive as any society—or global collection of societies—before us.

[Read: What it would take to see the world completely differently]

Over and over in the past 10,000 years or so, dynasties, empires, and whole congeries of states  have come into existence. They’ve flourished and then vanished. Again and again, humans have organized themselves into complex social entities that have eventually fallen apart, sometimes under climatic pressure, sometimes under forces released by it. Some of those civilizations, such as the Roman empire and the Mughal dynasty, are well known. But do you know the Corded Ware or Bell Beaker or Qijia cultures? How about the Hyksos in Egypt, circa 1640 B.C.? You may have heard of the Abbasid dynasty, which arose in the eighth century, but what about fifth-century Panjakent, “a magnificent jewel of a city in what is now Tajikistan”? Frankopan’s erudition is extravagant, as is his range of sources. The number of ancient societies and cultures he adduces as he guides us through time is almost staggering. But so is the fact that none of them survived. Becoming aware of their former existence—so many more of them than you ever imagined, an endless, almost biological skein of societal shapes and forms reaching back thousands of years—is enough to shift the ground under your feet. We think of this as “our” world, here and now, a culmination of sorts. But we’re just another episode in a social version of primary succession—like grasses growing on a new volcanic landscape.

One of humanity’s central myths about ourselves is that we have no habitat—nothing as circumscribed or as fixed as the relation between a red-winged blackbird and the wetland it lives beside, or a sea star and its tide pool. We save habitat for other creatures, because the word describes an irrevocable connection between a species and the environmental ground of its existence. (This is how Frankopan usually uses the word.) Humans, we believe, are too adaptable, too inventive to be pinned down—too flexible to be bounded. Plus, we don’t like to think of ourselves as animals. Our adaptability, like our mobility, is part of the evolutionary story we love to tell about Homo sapiens. But climate change is now shoving us up hard against the edges of our global habitat, and we can no longer pretend. Humans are no different from any other species whose habitat has been damaged or impaired or destroyed by us—except this time, the harm we’ve done is to ourselves.

In The Climate of London, a meteorological study published in 1818, the British chemist Luke Howard wrote this fascinating sentence: “Like fishes inhabiting the bottom of an ocean, we are insensible to much of what passes over our heads.” “Insensible” is how it feels to be unaware that you have a habitat. You might say that Howard’s sentence, written just before a new industrial England began to develop, signals the beginning of the end of what might be called our fishlike existence—our ability to ignore “what passes over our heads,” before atmospheric carbon began to increase. Reading that phrase, I can’t help thinking of John Ruskin’s observation that “one of the last pure sunsets” he ever saw was in 1876, nearly 150 years ago.

Our habitat is shaped and defined by climate but also by the presence of all other species on Earth (which help shape our climate)—something we find almost impossible to acknowledge. Humans have always lived in a planetary ecology that is the sum of all its parts. But in the past century and a half, we’ve channeled and suppressed and eliminated the reproductive potential of nature—the global torrent of other life in its habitat—to an extent that’s almost impossible to hold in one’s mind. We worry that the effect of climate change on humans will be catastrophic. But for innumerable species on this planet, the catastrophe has already come. We are their catastrophe, with untold effects on our own well-being. The Earth has never been Eden, and there has never been a Garden to return to. But if we don’t restrain ourselves now, the restraint the Earth imposes upon us will be brutal. We’ll come to know the nature of our habitat as we begin to be punished for violating its boundaries. That is the true story of Eden.