How to get your head around that searingly beautiful but complicated land that lies between the Caspian and Black Seas? The early Arab historian Al Masudi called the Caucasus jabal al-alsun, the mountain of tongues, and through the centuries the place has certainly seen its fair share of peoples, many of them troublesome, many of them troubled. Indeed, for somewhere you might think would be a transcontinental backwater, its outcrops, secluded valleys and expansive plains usefully separating its formidable neighbours – Russia to the north, Turkey and Iran to the south – it’s proved remarkably busy over the centuries; also persistently relevant. The turbulence of the region is rarely far from the news. Chechnya comes to mind – its two separatist wars – and Azerbaijan (upheavals in Nagorno-Karabakh), not to mention Moscow’s determination to make good its hold over Georgia.

After the ravages of the Black Death came the bloody conqueror Timur, who invaded no fewer than eight times

Put another way, the Great Caucasus Range provides a natural divide between east Europe and west Asia – yet even this barrier has failed to keep parties of either side out. Rather the opposite; the Caucasus proved a veritable thoroughfare of jealous warlords even before 1220, when the Mongols swept through, overpowering the Armenian army and all but breaking asunder the flourishing kingdom of Georgia. This was a prelude to more devastation in the form of the Black Death. Next came the bloody conqueror Timur, who invaded no fewer than eight times. So, when asked to review a history of the Caucasus, I might have been forgiven for hoping it would turn out to be a handy explainer, a neat little guide to clarify just who brought in what or did what unspeakable deed to whom.

I have to tell you, a handy little guide Christoph Baumer’s book is not. Weighing in at a couple of kilos, this second, concluding volume is more like those gloriously illustrated family-atlas-sized publications meant to tie in with a major exhibition at the British Museum. There are appendices – population stats, tables of languages, dynasties – and various indexes (of ‘concepts’ as well as people and places). At first glance, it is not a book that will appeal to those who like to curl up with a finely spun historical narrative – I’m thinking of William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain or my cousin Charles Allen’s Duel in the Snows.

Yet, as it turns out, it zings along. It’s a splendid achievement – informed, considered and clear. Though the fieldwork activities of the Swiss author are all but absent from the narrative, we soon understand that he’s an old hand on Central Asia and a worthy successor to a longstanding tradition of questing Europeans who have excited our imaginations with their tales of desert crossings astride Bactrian camels and of cities lost to the shifting sands. Baumer brings to mind the topographer Sven Hedin, the bespectacled Swede who mapped, among other things, the Wandering Lake of Lop Nor. One also thinks of explorers such as Nikolay Przewalski, he of the stocky wild horse, Francis Younghusband and Aurel Stein, who filled in blank charts and, unwittingly or not, became protagonists or pawns in the Great Game – not to mention the indomitable missionaries Mildred Cable and Evangeline French, and adventurer-writers such as Ella Maillart and Peter Fleming (his News from Tartary). Each in their own way told of passing through the wider region, but always with the same backdrop, the ruined splendour of those who had been before – the lichen-clad fortresses, rock tombs and broken monasteries on wind-harried crags.

There’s certainly no shortage of fascinating material, beginning around two million years ago, when into these realms spilled the first humans from Africa – not so much Homo habilis, our handyman ancestor, but Homo georgicus, Georgian Man. From then on, it was all action – the Neanderthals and in due course the northern horse peoples, Assyrians, Greeks, Anatolians, you name it. Wave upon wave they came, on foot, horseback or in war chariots, leaving behind pockets of survivors, each with their particular prejudices. Baumer enthrals us – more fallen towers, more fallen heroes – right to the present, with the states that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, such as Azerbaijan with its huge oil revenues.

Here he takes quite a risk, casting an eye to the future in a section entitled ‘Outlook’. Given the simmering way of the Caucasus both north and south, I’d have omitted that bit, and perhaps the more fanciful illustrations. In Volume I, published two years ago, I recall a bunch of Palaeolithic characters wearing surprisingly natty suits of animal skins depicted chasing goats off a cliff. In this volume, a centurion waves his gladius, a short, stabbing sword, before the assembled ranks, as the Roman army readies itself for battle. But these renditions of the past are few and far between, and the photographs are spectacular. Once in a while there comes along a book by a fellow explorer that you wish to heaven you’d had the wherewithal and body of knowledge to write yourself. This is such a book.