Warfare and violence were central to the identity and experience of early states in the ancient Near East. This chapter focuses on the earliest historical records documenting the rise of kingdoms in early Mesopotamia and their relationship with violence and warfare. It argues that a rhetoric of state-sponsored violence developed in Mesopotamia that guided countless generations of behaviour. The only violence that was legitimate was state sponsored and divinely sanctioned. Kings promised to banish violence at home, except when performed under their auspices, and they pledged to bring the outside world to battle in a muscular extension of power over that world. The chapter is divided into three basic parts: first it introduces a series of related topics about how violence and warfare were imagined and understood in early Mesopotamia; second, it discusses violence in its early historical context by examining cycles of violence related to the growth of the state; and finally it will briefly examine the later development of these kingdoms of violence and the royal rhetoric that accompanied their creation and expansion.

This chapter examines depictions of violence in the early period of Chinese history up to the second century BCE. Violence is widely present in works of history, literature and intellectual history from the period. What is distinctive about the Chinese case is the negative tone of most of these depictions. Early sources show violence, including martial violence, in at best equivocal and often unfavourable ways. This chapter explores depictions in classic texts such as the Book of Songs, which contains poems that pass over battle to deplore the loss and separation that war entailed. Prose descriptions of violence, whether in the Book of Documents or in bronze vessel inscriptions, tend to record fighting, its aftermath and the victors’ rewards without much celebration. Thinkers including Confucius and Mozi explicitly criticise violence, especially warfare. Sunzi, famous for his Art of War, considers the strategy and tactics of its topic, yet decries fighting as inferior to other methods of achieving victory. Even the proposals of Shang Yang, who is commonly seen as a proponent of government through force, have considerable non-coercive elements to them. Just one form of violence, namely revenge, gets much positive attention, and that comes relatively late.

The European Neolithic was a period of enormous social and economic changes affecting lifeways and population size, as well as beliefs and world views. By its closing stages in around 2500 BCE central and western European communities had been transformed from mobile or semi-mobile hunter-fisher-gatherer groups to settled populations reliant on farming and herding. The extent and significance of violence within and between communities during this period has long been debated, although attempts to resolve this issue have tended to generate more heat than light. However recent years have seen a growing corpus of evidence for violent assaults recognised among human remains from throughout Neolithic Europe. Viewed in aggregate, this line of evidence casts considerable doubt over notions of the period as a time of relative peace and stability. This chapter draws together the skeletal evidence for violence-related injuries from across Neolithic Europe and discusses these in terms of both overall prevalence and regional variation as well as the extent to which variations in demographic distribution are discernible. These patterns are considered in regard to the changing social contexts in which they occurred, with particular attention given to the role of population expansion, resource competition and the rise of social inequality. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the Neolithic in the development of organised violence among human societies.

Upper Egyptian iconography early on equates warfare and hunting as corresponding, ritualised displays of the triumph of order over chaos. Within rituals, displays of physical prowess may represent military activity, and within the realm of actual warfare the subjugation of foreigners may take the form of ritual execrations and the ritualised display of both living and deceased enemies. In the practice of war the Egyptians emphasised manoeuvre over the clash of a shield wall, and captured enemies appear on the whole to have been given a route to acculturation through service to the pharaonic state. Literary sources reveal the use of epistolary taunts in addition to physical violence. As part of the Egyptian concept of the enemy as the opposite of Egypt and order, foreign women tend to appear in a more positive light than do male enemies, and no evidence appears for sexual violence as an element of sanctioned warfare.

In the 1960s African hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari Desert were described as gentle people who used dispute resolution to prevent violence between band members. This ideal was a good fit for those anthropologists on one side of a debate on the nature of human behaviour. The Kalahari San played a role in the debate not only because anthropologists had categorised them as ‘gentle’, but also because they were seen as frozen remnants of our prehistoric ancestors. More recently, researchers have realised that the San of prehistory had very different lives from the ones anthropologists encountered in the ‘ethnographic present’. Evidence from archaeological skeletons from the middle and late Holocene suggests that interpersonal violence was a regular occurrence among the prehistoric foragers of the southern African Later Stone Age. Research has documented a number of antemortem and perimortem injuries on skeletons that can only be signs of interpersonal violence. The injuries have been found on women and children as well as adult males, and evidence suggests that inter-band violence was common in prehistoric times and that forager competition for resources may have been the cause of conflict.

This chapter uses the figure of Arion, the lyric poet from Methymna whose story is told early in Herodotus’s Histories, to explore the adoption of Herodotus, in the long nineteenth century, as the ‘Romantic poet-sage of History’. This is the title bestowed upon him by the Anglican priest and hymn-writer John Ernest Bode, who in 1853 (following in the fashion set by Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome) adapted tales from Herodotus into old English and Scottish ballad forms. Herodotus was seen as the prose avatar of poets – of medieval balladeers, lyric singers, epic bards and even authors of verse drama. These configurations of Herodotus are cast into sharp relief by comparing them with his previous incarnation, in the Early Modern and earlier eighteenth century, as a writer who most strongly resembled a novelist. Isaac Littlebury, Herodotus’s 1709 translator, was attracted to the historian for the simple reason that in 1700 he had enjoyed success with a previous translation. But the earlier work was certainly not a translation of an ancient historian. Littlebury had translated Fénelon’s Télémaque, a work of fantasy fiction derived ultimately from the Posthomerica, perhaps better described as a novel combining a rites-of-passage theme with an exciting travelogue.

This chapter examines how the authors of the Mahābhārata, India’s great epic, seek strategically to edify real human warriors and kings through a set of martial tropes and expectations. Specifically, nine chapters of the epic’s twelfth book, the Śānti Parvan (MBh.12.96–104), present in religious and ritual terminology a clear set of ideals, which kings can use to convince warriors that fighting and dying in battle is the right thing to do. For example, the paradigmatic model for the courageous behaviour of human warriors is the śūra (‘hero, champion’). In contrast to his heroic exploits, acting like a ‘coward’ (bhīru) is the single most abhorrent thing a warrior could do in social and cosmological terms. What is more, warfare is reconceived in ritual terms and thus dying in battle is elevated to an act of ritual sacrifice which will secure the fallen warrior everlasting heaven with its promise of sexually eager nymphs. Consequently, these chapters provide kings with a coherent masculine ideology to ensure the loyalty of troops, whose willing death in battle will secure martial victory and ultimately protect the kingdom.

The theme of violence is largely represented in the visual media of ancient Mesopotamia and Syria, from ancient times (fourth millennium BCE) up to the periods of the great empires of Assyria and Babylonia in the first millennium CE. Violent scenes, mostly related to war, principally show the punishment and killing of enemies according to recurrent visual topoi – such as beheading, beating, impalement, blinding, cutting and amputation of limbs – on different media, from cylinder seals to inlays and larger reliefs. This chapter seeks to point out the differing nature of the visual documents and contexts where scenes of violence on monuments and pictures were eventually shown, displayed and thus perceived, and will analyse the representation of violence accordingly, taking into consideration the use of violence within the religious and political spheres and pointing to cultural differences across time as a reflection of the political system.Mesopotamia, Syria, ritual, sacred violence, warfare, prisoners of war, rituals of war, visual narrative, visibility, audience

Little thought per se has been given to women as agents of violence in antiquity, let alone to the role of the royal harem as the site of revenge-fuelled violence and murder. This chapter addresses this gap by exploring how royal women in the Persian Empire could be instruments of violence. While acknowledging the Greek obsession with this topos, it goes beyond the Western preoccupation with the harem as a site of Oriental decadence and attempts to put stories of women’s violence against women into its ancient Near Eastern context. It explores the mutilation of the body and is particularly focused on the Herodotean tale (which has genuine Persian roots) of the revenge mutilations of Amestris, wife of Xerxes I.

Evidence for violence and organised warfare in Iron Age Europe is varied and abundant, but it is not clear how frequently large-scale conflict occurred. Weapons, including especially swords, spears and lances, are common in graves and deposits. Defensive weapons, such as shields, helmets and body armour, also occur but are less common. The fortification of hilltops for defensive purposes is characteristic in much of Iron Age Europe. Representations of warriors, including stone statues bearing arms and scenes of marching troops, show how the weapons were deployed by soldiers. Only a few actual battlefields have been investigated. Weapons and landscape defences surely played important symbolic roles in the Iron Age, but the extent of armed conflict is not yet fully clear.

By 1830 the famous flashpoints of Napoleonic Egyptomania – the Battle of the Nile and acquisition of the Rosetta Stone – were remembered with pride as evocative tableau in Britain’s national narrative. However, they were recognized as belonging to a previous generation. The visions of Egypt (ancient and modern) that survived them were rarely flattering. Throughout the 1820s and early 1830s, most Britons who wrote about Egypt were dismissive at best and at worst hostile: their Egypt was primarily biblical, the oppressor described in Exodus and the prophets. Whether in art, in diverse articles for the periodical press or in books of ancient history tinged with scripture, evangelical angst often bubbled beneath the surface of Egypt’s representation. Looming up from amongst ‘the wrecks of time’ the fate of biblical Egypt was wielded as a warning against hubris and luxury.

How far the Father of History travelled in his researches – whether he indeed went to Egypt, Syria or the Black Sea – has been one of the most heated questions in Herodotean scholarship. Herodotus’s Histories show only the slightest knowledge of the Tin Islands, or indeed they show no knowledge at all except of the name. The quotation which opened this chapter, however, is one of a number of Herodotean fragments that purport to describe his travels beyond the Mediterranean. These texts, the longest of which runs to thirty-eight pages of printed Greek, see the historian travelling to all corners of Britain, to Ireland, to Iceland, to India, the sources of the Nile and even to the New World. If some of these destinations render the reader suspicious, (s)he may be more so on learning that Herodotus’s travels appear to take in events and people that the historical author would have been hard pressed to see: that in Mexico he describes the Aztecs, that in India he witnesses the Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 and that in Britain he pays particular attention to Oxford and Cambridge, London Zoo, and Eton College.

Over the course of more than a millennium, the ancient Greeks and Romans put hundreds of millions of animals to death in acts of sacrifice, yet also developed the first vegetarian literature and made animals subject to legal proceedings. This complex situation affected major trends in ancient philosophy, such as Pythagoreanism, and also ancient cosmological concepts. To some degree, philosophy and religious custom clashed with one another, and philosophers and other writers responded by trying to moderate, ignore or avoid this conflict. Missing from the ancient literature is any concept of animal rights. Scholarship on animal sacrifice, much of it fascinated by the subject of sacrificial violence, has given anthropological and zoological explanations for ancient practices, but has not reached a consensus on why sacrifice was widespread, or on how it fitted into ancient paganism as a whole. Recent writing on the rights and status of animals has only begun to influence scholarship.

In March 1897, the eclectic Edinburgh-based periodical Blackwood’s Magazine published a review of Dr Robertson’s recent book on the remote and strategically sensitive region of Káfiristán – a rugged, mountainous territory spanning the modern Afghan province of Nuristan and the western margins of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. In tracing the way in which western knowledge of Káfiristán had gradually expanded over time its author, William Broadfoot (1844–1922), placed particular emphasis upon the decision to open a British agency at Gilgit in order to facilitate intelligence-gathering about the adjacent region. Broadfoot claimed that medical officers were particularly suited for such ‘pioneering work’ due to their ‘considerable scientific attainments … educated power[s] of observation and … knowledge of human nature’. Mindful, perhaps, of the incident which had forced the closure of the Gilgit agency and Dr Robertson’s subsequent forays into Káfiri territory, Broadfoot then highlighted the respect and protection that medical training brought such individuals even when travelling amongst ‘savage tribes’. The point is illustrated with a string of (modern) examples (Dr Lord, Sir John Login and others); however, pride of place goes to a (comparatively minor) figure from the Histories, Democedes ‘the physician of Crotona and son-in-law of Milo, [who] was taken prisoner with Polycrates, and sent to the court of Darius’, where he ‘cured the king and queen and received honours’. Polycrates was crucified.

This chapter summarises the main themes of the book, placing individual chapters within diverse thematic frameworks. After a brief discussion of the evolution of human violence, it introduces the Palaeolithic and Neolithic beginnings of human violence before examining prehistoric and ancient warfare. This includes considerations of the role of farming in the Neolithic, the more specialised warfare of the Bronze and Iron Ages, the era of classical antiquity and the growing importance of osteoarchaeology in understanding early violence. The discussion then continues with the other themes of the volume: intimate and collective violence; religion, ritual and violence; violence, crime and the state; and representations and constructions of violence.

This chapter explores the role of violence in classical Athens and its relationship to Greek society and politics from the later archaic age to the classical period. It focuses closely on both Athenian democracy and Athenian law, especially in the literature and forensic speeches. It begins by analysing the changing relationship of the state to the individual alongside the declining place of violent retribution in solving what increasingly became legal disputes. It then moves on to assess the significance of Athenian law and the role of the law courts in meditating violent encounters. Finally, the chapter examines the role of violence in Athenian politics in the fifth century BCE, especially with regards to the oligarchic revolutions at the end of the Peloponnesian War.