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This book reveals how violent pasts were constructed by ancient Mediterranean societies, the ideologies they served, and the socio-political processes and institutions they facilitated. Combining case studies from Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, Israel/Judah, and Rome, it moves beyond essentialist dichotomies such as “victors” and “vanquished” to offer a new paradigm for studying representations of past violence across diverse media, from funerary texts to literary works, chronicles, monumental reliefs, and other material artefacts such as ruins. It thus paves the way for a new comparative approach to the study of collective violence in the ancient world.
This book reveals how violent pasts were constructed by ancient Mediterranean societies, the ideologies they served, and the socio-political processes and institutions they facilitated. Combining case studies from Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, Israel/Judah, and Rome, it moves beyond essentialist dichotomies such as “victors” and “vanquished” to offer a new paradigm for studying representations of past violence across diverse media, from funerary texts to literary works, chronicles, monumental reliefs, and other material artefacts such as ruins. It thus paves the way for a new comparative approach to the study of collective violence in the ancient world.
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This essay deals with the representation and interpretation of Roman military defeats of the Second Punic War in the later Roman tradition, especially in Roman historiography of the late Republican and early Imperial periods. It argues that the ongoing process of reinterpreting these events enabled the Romans to transform these disasters into helpful lessons from their own past. The Roman defeats in this war were not only explained but also used to demonstrate Rome’s outstanding ability to learn and recover from defeats, which caused a rebirth of true Roman spirit and restored unity among the Romans. Remembering acts of collective violence thus became an important part of the narratives the Romans told about their past. As a result, the defeats of the Second Punic War were seen not only as the darkest hours of Roman history but also as a time of national testing in which their defeats helped the Romans to rediscover their own virtues.
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The annihilation of entire people groups represents the most extreme form of collective violence. It is well-known that ancient empires could depict themselves as perpetrators of genocidal violence to demonstrate their power. Literary traditions from those living under imperial dominance, however, have received little scholarly attention. This essay analyzes the violent outlook of the book of Esther, a Jewish narrative within the Hebrew Bible that offers unique insights for the study of collective violence in antiquity. The narrative invents a past in which the Jewish people appear both as both possible victims of systematic annihilation and as the successful perpetrators of large-scale killing. This essay explores the cross-cultural borrowings in the book of Esther and proposes that it adapts a Greek literary pattern: when individual actions call into question the honor and status of imperial agents or imperial rule, collective retaliation and large-scale killing are legitimate means to reestablish the status quo. In adapting and transforming this motif, the Esther narrative sheds light on how Jewish scribes used fictional storytelling not only to refute charges made against their people but also to justify their own group’s exertion of violence. This observation adds further weight to recent scholarly proposals to contextualize the Esther narrative in the late Hellenistic period, and it also hints at the possibility that the book of Esther reflects key aspects of Hasmonean ideology.
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Early Jewish writings are replete with narratives of warfare and collective violence. Yet relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to how these accounts of violence affected the way Jews structured their festal calendar. This essay examines the festivals described in 1 and 2 Maccabees that serve to commemorate the most impressive military victories of the Maccabean revolt in the second century BCE—namely, Hanukkah, Nicanor’s Day, and Simon’s Day. Paying attention to the similarities and differences between the festal texts of 1 and 2 Maccabees, I argue that the two books employ a common commemorative strategy to foster a positive collective memory of the violence of the Maccabean revolt that could both legitimize the founding figures of the Hasmonean dynasty and compete with the commemorative cultures of other Hellenistic communities. This evidence of commemorative creativity and cultural adaptation by the authors of 1 and 2 Maccabees sheds valuable light on how the memorialization of violence in the ancient Mediterranean was shaped not simply by the ideologies and institutions of discrete societies but also by their intersections and cross-cultural borrowings.
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The history of the ancient Mediterrannean in the first millenium BCE was marked by many battles and can arguably be characterized as violent. Yet what had a lasting impact on people groups and their sense of identity was not just the event of war itself but also the way it was remembered. The significance of memory and commemoration has been increasingly recognized in research on collective violence. In this introduction, I briefly discuss the concepts of “collective violence” and “cultural memory” and point out what makes collective violence a particularly rich topic to investigate from the perspective of cultural memory. The introduction brings the essays in this volume into conversation with each other and highlights aspects at the intersection of war and memory such as victory and defeat, victims and aggressors, triumphalist and victimological narratives, public memories and agents of memory production, and the interrelation between literary, material, spatial, and performative forms of commemoration. The introduction concludes by suggesting how the regional approach of the present volume allows for the exploration of memories of collective violence in a transcultural perspective.
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While the biblical portrayal of Egypt as the violent oppressor of the Israelite people is well known, Egyptian depictions of their northern neighbors have received less scholarly attention. Yet several iconographic and literary sources reflect on the roles of the Israelites and the Hebrews from an Egyptian perspective. This study analyzes Egyptian representations of encounters between Egyptians, Hyksos, and Israelites/Hebrews from the Late Bronze Age to the Ptolemaic period with a focus on violent conflict. By tracing distinctive shifts in the Egyptian evaluation(s), it demonstrates that the formation of ancient Egyptian history always involved processes of rewriting and reconstructing older memories regarding violent conflicts with Egypt’s neighbors.
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The visual qualities of the Greek Classical style—poise, balance, harmony—and its post-antique legacy can belie the violence of its time. In fact, there were many violent representations in Classical Greek art (480–323 BCE). This essay first discusses some of the main iconographic and stylistic characteristics of explicit images of collective violence in order to correct misperceptions and probe how depictions related to norms, expectations, and memories. It then extends discussion to material responses that are less dependent on pictures. Organized around different participants in collective violence—warriors, the gods, and mourners—it reveals how material culture offered different ways in different contexts for people to engage with and respond to acts of collective violence. Objects were a mechanism for shaping a rhetoric of just war and for focusing the community on moments of triumph and acts of sacrifice. Although objects offered a medium for individual responses and even dissent, taken together the material responses to collective violence operated at so many different time scales and in such a variety of spaces in the cityscape and the landscape that they served to promote both the cohesion of a community through shared memories and its participation in ongoing violence.
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This essay proposes that, within the biblical books of Samuel and Chronicles, there are two distinct narrative modes of memorializing the leadership of Israel’s first king, Saul, in war. Whereas 1 Sam 31 and 2 Sam 21 negotiate the remembrance of Saul through their depiction of geographical space, 2 Sam 1 depicts a textualized memorialization of Saul’s heroism performed by David. These two modes, one spatial and one verbal, can be regarded as two different types of sites of memory that are expressed in narrative form in the biblical text. They also serve distinct rhetorical functions. The spatial mode participates in a broader discourse on Israelite identity—specifically, the status of Transjordan and the identification of its population as insiders or outsiders—while the poetic-performative mode contributes to an idealized depiction of another king of Israel: David.
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Violence and memories of violence are depicted visually in material imagery (iconography). In ancient times rulers used images to impress: to show their power, to serve as a warning, to demand obedience. Such imagery is typical of great powers like that of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia. This essay contributes to the study of memories of violence by examining orthostats depicting scenes of violence dating from the first millennium BCE at the cities of Carchemish (Long Wall of Sculpture) and Samʾal (southern city gate and outer citadel gate). The material culture of these cities visualized the collective memory of smaller states that became prominent after the fall of the Bronze Age empires (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Hatti) and before the dominance by the later Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Empires. Such images were used to communicate the king’s sociopolitical power. They were purposefully placed on strategically situated walls and gates where they could be seen by the public. The political elites who ruled these cities constructed what they wanted the memory of events to be, in this way manipulating historical memory. Such scenes maintained the status quo, created a local identity, and gave the established order a visual dimension. This essay treats the motifs of severed heads of the enemy and enemies being trampled under chariot horses. These motifs are compared with material imagery and some textual sources from other parts of ancient southwestern Asia. The loss of a head conveyed total defeat and the severed head also served as a trophy. The enemy crushed under the chariot horses indicated complete annihilation of the enemy and served as a symbol of victory.
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The Cycle of Inaros is a collection of epic stories written in Demotic known from papyri dating to the late Hellenistic and Roman periods. These narratives depict the fights and adventures of a group of Egyptian princes and warriors who lived in the early first millennium BCE. For nearly a century these texts have been at the heart of a controversy between the proponents of a Homeric (or at least Hellenic) origin to those who see them as purely Egyptian works. The present essay analyzes these texts from a slightly different perspective—namely, it inquires into the narrative tone rather than the literary origins of some of these stories. Indeed, while some battle scenes appear to be truly epic, in the sense that they describe bloody battles, another seems comic. These different registers may reflect different types of memorialization of the historical events being depicted.