I haven’t read it front to back (yet?). It has interesting info on the practice of magic in antiquity and some cool insight into ancient worldview. It’s written by several authors (each episode/section of a diff one focusing on different aspects), most are full of footnotes and they all definitely read like world history academic documents, but not science ones. Maybe the ones that rely more on archeology get close. Very few opinions, most conjectures and interpretations are cited, but it manages to have good content and if you don’t mind skipping some boring parts, mostly manages to stay interesting.