Warfare in Spanish Levantine rock art (original) (raw)
Related papers
Violence in Neolithic Iberia: new readings of Levantine rock art
Antiquity, 89, 344 : pp 309-329., 2015
How violent was life in Neolithic society, and was there anything resembling organised warfare? Recent research has largely overturned ideas of peaceful farming societies. Spanish Levantine rock art offers a unique insight into conflict in Neolithic society, with images of violence, real or imagined, being acted out in scenes preserved in rock shelters. Combining this body of data with evidence from the archaeological record, a new way of understanding the imagery in rock art is here proposed. Ethnographic and anthropological methodologies allow the author to show howsocio-cultural behaviours and individual social roles can be read from rock art.
The representation of violence in the rock art of the Sahara and the Spanish Levant
Manolakakis, Schlanger and Coudart (eds.) 2017: European Archaeology - Identities & Migrations. Hommages à Jean-Paul Demoule. Leiden: Sidestone Press., 2017
The earliest representation of physical violence in human history is probably found in the rock art of the Spanish Levant and the Sahara. Amongst thousands of depictions known from both areas, a few dozen show combat scenes between small groups of archers. Contrary to the first representations of violence in Egypt and Mesopotamia during the IVth and IIIrd millennium but also in Bronze Age Europe, these images do not express a glorification or celebration of violence. A comparison between the fighting scenes of the Sahara and the Spanish Levant and their chronology allows us to delve into the social background of this first evidence of human awareness concerning violence and its consequences.
Davide Nadali, 2020, Representations of Violence in Ancient Mesopotamia and Syria
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.
Study of Violence from the Region of the Ancient Near East and Its Neighbors (2017)
Violence is a common motif that appears throughout the well-studied narrative and historical texts and images from the region of the ancient Near East and its neighbors, from Prehistory to Late Antiquity. Although depicted in both divine and human realms (e.g. Enuma Elish, Stele of Vultures, Chronicles, Battle of Qadesh, Baʿlu Cycle, Torah, Josephus), violence, whether physical or psychological (e.g. interpersonal, corporate, or structural), has been insufficiently studied from the perspectives of intention, motivation and legacy. During this three-year session, we will investigate the topic of violence through different methodological frameworks: (1) in 2017, the anthropology and hermeneutics of text and image analysis, (2) in 2018, the intentions (voluntary or not) and motivations of the authors in their use of violence as part of the narrative arc, and (3) in 2019, the philosophy of a contextualized violence (its social, moral and political questions) based on the understanding of text as well as image. We welcome abstracts from art historians, philologists, historians, anthropologists, and scholars interested in extending their analysis of violence beyond the bounds of traditional text-oriented approaches and determinism. We envision an interdisciplinary session attracting papers from Prehistorians, Assyriologists, Bible scholars, Hittitologists, Egyptologists, Aegeanists, and Byzantinists alike.
2018
The idea of a predominantly bellicose and cruel Assyrian Empire (Ninth – Seventh centuries BCE) was based on certain visions inherited from the past (ranging from classical authors to the Hebrew Bible). From the nineteenth century onwards it developed following archaeological discoveries and the deciphering of cuneiform texts. Alongside official documents (inscriptions, annals, etc.), the images of the reliefs of Assyrian palaces played a central role in this construction. Considering this vision as the result of ideological and propagandistic manipulation of royal discourse and identifying an acritical approach of modern historiography is necessary, but not sufficient. This article seeks to offer an alternative appreciation. It proposes that it is necessary to conceive images of violence as active agents of the social phenomenon of sacred war, in a context of a process of expansion. The responses point in a dual direction: first to the relationship between visual violence and the specific type of Assyrian expansionism; in second place, to the ritual nature of visual artefacts.