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The object of demographic history is the description and explanation of the size, structure, and development of (ancient) populations in their relationship to living space. It should be noted that there are natural and uncontrollable determinants of population development as well as controllable ones, and that the interwoven determinants can simultaneously be cause and effect of such development. So far, ancient demographic history has particularly been interested in ancient views of population development, questions of the size of ancient populations (at a particular point in time or over a particular period of time), the age and gender structures of ancient societies, and particular determinants of population development such as life expectancy, marriage practices, reproduction, and fertility, and population movements. Answers to all questions concerned are normally based on the one hand on ancient source material, which, while qualitatively and/or quantitatively susceptible to evaluation, is not unproblematic (see below), and on the other hand on consideration of modern model life tables (however, available only for quite recent populations), the creation of more reliable high‐mortality models, and comparative ethnological material. In doing so, the demographic history of ancient societies has made use of the discoveries of adjacent disciplines such as the historical demography of other epochs, archeology, anthropology, sociobiology, cultural geography, and sub‐disciplines of ancient history such as social, nutritional, economic, and medical history.

It has long been known that population size and population development have always had a significant influence on political, economic, cultural, and mental performances and developments:

the distribution of people between town and country was instrumental in the creation of collective identity, and may reflect the scale of division of labor and commerce; human mobility mediated information flows and culture change; mortality and morbidity were principal determinants of wellbeing, and determined fertility (and thus gender relations), investment in human capital, and economic productivity, and more generally shaped people's hopes and fears. The same is true of marriage customs and household structure. Classical civilization was the product of a thoroughly alien environment of frequent pregnancy and sudden death. Along with technological progress and scientific discovery, it was demographic change that separated the modern world from the more distant past. Archaic patterns of marriage, reproduction, and death seemed as natural and immutable then as they are exotic to us, and we cannot hope to approach ancient history without a solid understanding of what these conditions were and how they permeated life. This is the true challenge of demography.

(Scheidel 2009: p. 134)

The Malthusian Law of Population in the meantime has been seen as flawed by its ignorance of factors such as technology, poverty, endemic disease, wars, and natural disasters, and modern theories have got as their point of departure the concept of demographic equilibrium, i.e. the idea that a population adapts itself to its biological, economic, and social‐structural environment in such a way that mortality and fertility balance each other out over an extended period of time and at a level that depends on the population's resources, technology, and standards of living (Scheidel 2007: 50 ff). Therefore, “significant demographic change is mainly (to be) attributed to exogenous factors: climate, technology and endemic disease patterns, and in the short run to famines, particularly virulent epidemics and political factors like war” (Jursa 2010: p. 37).