Collective Violence and Memory in the Ancient Mediterranean: (135 Culture and History of the Ancient Near East)

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.

Table of Contents:
Preface List of Figures Abbreviations Notes on Contributors 1 Introduction  Sonja Ammann 2 The Ruins of Jericho (Joshua 6) and the Memorialization of Violence  Angelika Berlejung 3 Memorializing Saul’s Wars in Samuel and Chronicles  Stephen Germany 4 Fighting Annihilation: The Justification of Collective Violence in the Book of Esther and Beyond  Helge Bezold 5 Hellenizing Hanukkah: Reframing War Commemoration in 1 and 2 Maccabees  Julia Rhyder 6 Memories of Violence in the Material Imagery of Karkamiš and Samʾal: The Motifs of Severed Heads and the Enemy Under Chariot Horses  Izak Cornelius 7 Israel’s Violence in Egypt’s Cultural Memory  Antonio Loprieno 8 Real Fights and Burlesque Parody: The Depiction of Violence in the Inaros Cycle  Damien Agut-Labordère 9 Material Responses to Collective Violence in Classical Athens  Nathan T. Arrington 10 Remembering and Forgetting the Sack of Athens  David C. Yates 11 The Darkest Hour (?): Military Defeats during the Second Punic War in Roman Memory Culture  Simon Lentzsch 12 Rebellious Narratives, Repeat Engagements, and Roman Historiography  Jessica Clark Index

About the Author :
Sonja Ammann, Ph.D. (University of Göttingen, 2014), is Professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at the University of Basel. She is currently directing a research project on Transforming Memories of Collective Violence in the Hebrew Bible funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Her recent publications deal with the Babylonian conquest as a cultural trauma. Helge Bezold, Ph.D. (University of Basel, 2022), is a post-doctoral researcher and teacher at the University of Marburg, Germany. His research focuses on representations of violence and power in the Hebrew and Greek Old Testament. His dissertation was published as Esther – Eine Gewaltgeschichte. Die Gewaltdarstellungen in der hebräischen und griechischen Esterüberlieferung (De Gruyter, 2023). Stephen Germany, Ph.D. (Emory University, 2016), is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Basel. His publications focus on the formation of the narrative literature of the Hebrew Bible, including The Exodus-Conquest Narrative: The Composition of the Non-Priestly Narratives in Exodus–Joshua (Mohr Siebeck, 2017). Julia Rhyder, Ph.D. (University of Lausanne, 2018), is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She has published widely on ritual in the Hebrew Bible and the history of Israelite religion, including Centralizing the Cult: The Holiness Legislation in Leviticus 17–26 (Mohr Siebeck, 2019).

Review :
"Overall, the chapters brought together in this volume provide an engaging and thought-provoking collection of examples of how ancient Mediterranean societies remembered violence in their own pasts; readers interested in conflict and memory in any one of the cultures discussed will find novel points of comparison." Elizabeth Palazzolo, Providence College