[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This edited volume is based on a fall 2020 seminar series on “Historical Narratives and Memorialization of Collective Violence in Antiquity” at the University of Basel, supplemented by additional chapters solicited for the publication. The editors begin their preface with the adage “history is written by the victors” before noting the difficulty of identifying simple “victory” and “defeat” in conflicts in the ancient world: depictions of victors and victims in the available evidence are affected by the motivations of those claiming victory or portraying defeat as well as the specific historical circumstances in which a conflict was memorialized (vii). The essays in this volume explore how members of ancient Mediterranean societies shaped their shared memory of violent episodes, whether they were celebrating a victory or reframing a loss as noble and necessary sacrifice, justification for retaliation, or motivation for future victory. This focus on the process of memorialization unites the wide-ranging subject matter of its twelve contributions, which all address the means by which narratives of collective violence are constructed through their representation in different media.[1] Contributions vary in length, from under 15 to over 40 pages, and each chapter is followed by its own bibliography (particularly helpful as the range of subject matter results in minimal overlap among their bibliographic entries). Following the editors’ preface, the publication opens with lists of figures and abbreviations; the end matter includes separate indices for modern authors, geographical names, ancient sources, and subjects.
This volume addresses an extensive geographical and chronological range within ancient Mediterranean society: the twelve chapters discuss conflicts from Spain in the west to the Persian Empire in the east and material from Bronze Age Egypt to the Roman empire at the end of the first millennium BCE. A wide variety of source material is also represented (literary texts, historiography, inscriptions, sculpture, vase paintings, and more), reflecting the understanding articulated in Ammann’s introductory chapter that “collective memory is not limited to oral and textual communicative processes but extends to material objects and spaces” (6). Several contributions bring textual and visual evidence into dialogue: Antonio Loprieno compares Bronze Age Egyptian funerary art and texts with segments of the Ptolemaic historian Manetho’s narrative of Bronze Age conflict, and Angelika Berlejung considers how the text of Joshua 6 provides an etiology for the visible history of destruction seen in the ruins of Jericho. By virtue of the range of specialties covered, any individual reader will find some part of the content less familiar, but several editorial choices assist readers with material outside their expertise.[2]
Three aspects of the volume’s approach are especially useful: the inclusion of types of collective violence other than direct conflict between independent states in open battle, the focus on memory and processes of memorialization to examine how the understanding of violent episodes was shaped by the people remembering them, and the broad geographical and chronological scope.
An extensive introduction by Sonja Ammann, one of four editors and the researcher in whose project this publication originated, explains the volume’s approach to studying the intersection of violence and memory in the ancient Mediterranean, highlights recurring themes among contributions, and situates it within recent trends in related research. Ammann’s discussion of the decision to focus on “collective violence” rather than “war” argues that the evidence explored by contributors defies more restrictive categorization; the choice of a broader term therefore “aims to include other forms of armed intergroup conflict such as riot, revolt, and insurrection” (2). This decision made it possible to incorporate material such as Damien Agut-Labordère’s discussion of the portrayal of battles in Demotic epic stories (including conflicts between competing Egyptian princes and their supporters, which may reflect tensions in the aftermath of the Assyrian conquest of Egypt but are themselves closer to duels than war), Julia Rhyder’s chapter on commemoration of the Maccabean revolt in the context of Hellenistic commemorative festivals (based on the rebellion of a small group of dissidents who used guerilla tactics to oppose the overwhelming force of the Seleucid army they could not have faced in open battle) and Helge Bezold’s consideration of the motif of large-scale collective violence in Esther (set against a cultural backdrop in which the Jewish people, living under Achaemenid control and scattered throughout the Persian empire, lack the ability to assemble an army that could do battle with Persian forces).[3]
In a similar vein, Ammann calls attention to how “roles of victor and vanquished, victim and aggressor” (8) are difficult to delineate and can change over time, particularly as outlooks on a conflict shift, and may be further obscured in the narratives that preserve memories of violent events by factors including reluctance to admit some defeats (as David Yates explores in the lack of public commemoration of the Athenians who died in their failed defense of the Acropolis against the Persians). Considering collective violence through the lens of memory shifts the focus from attempting to reconstruct “the actual violent situation in all its messiness” (7) to understanding the processes by which wars, revolts, battles, and other violent episodes gradually become the history famously said to be written by the victors. Stephen Germany’s discussion of divergent accounts of Saul’s death and the treatment of his body in Samuel and in Chronicles illustrates how the memory of violence may hold different significances to different groups, or to the same group at different points in time: both versions memorialize Saul’s death with very specific spatial and geographic details, as Germany shows (59-61), but their different portrayals of how Saul’s body was treated reflect changing attitudes towards geographic and cultural boundaries (63-6). In cases such as the aftermath of Roman losses at Cannae and Lake Trasimene, as Simon Lentzsch discusses, the battles continued to be understood as disastrous defeats, but the Roman memory of those losses reframed them as sources of pride in their own ability to learn from failure. Sometimes, ambiguities in how participants in conflict are remembered do not even require the passage of time or different audiences. Jessica Clark’s analysis of how specific Latin vocabulary describing changes in loyalty is used in Roman historiography observes that writers might sometimes find it expedient to avoid clearly characterizing actors and actions in either direction: for example, Caesar’s prudent narration of former opponents having a change of heart “allows him to succinctly report the act without characterizing his new allies as oath breakers” (258-9).
The broad chronological and geographic scope of the volume provides opportunities for recurring motifs to leap out at the reader in material not typically considered together: for example, visual representations of severed heads as trophies of victory in Near Eastern reliefs (see figs. 6.2A, 6.4, 6.6, 6.7 in Izak Cornelius’ chapter), when seen together with an Attic vase painting of Nike setting up enemy armor as a trophy on the battlefield (fig. 9.6 in Nathan Arrington’s chapter), emphasize the physicality of this mode of memorializing conflict in the Greek world. The juxtaposition provides a reminder of the close connection between removing an enemy’s helmet and removing their head, reinforcing Arrington’s characterization of the origins of the tropaion in temporary battlefield monuments “closely linked to the acts of violence on the battlefield that they commemorated” (171). Contrasts between similar topics in different contributions are also instructive: Arrington points out that the focus on struggle and anticipation in Classical Greek art leads to a preference for portraying moments at the height of battle, not its aftermath, and for depicting losses on both sides rather than a rout (166-9), in strong contrast to the reliefs discussed by Cornelius, which depict kings in opposition to their bloody and broken enemies after achieving total victory (121-2).
The range of content illustrated by these examples is a considerable strength of this volume but does limit the ability to fully explore the phenomena it discusses; given the breadth of material tackled, a significantly longer publication would be required to consider, for example, both textual and material evidence from each of the included geographical areas and for each period covered. Nevertheless, it succeeds in “illuminat[ing] broader patterns in how violent episodes were memorialized in the ancient Mediterranean” (vii) by introducing the reader to thought-provoking examples of those broader patterns in a variety of media and from a variety of times and places and laying the groundwork for further discussion of the productive intersection of memory and violence.
Errors are rare and unlikely to cause significant confusion.[4] There are some minor inconsistencies which may have arisen from the variety of languages transliterated for proper nouns (e.g. the same place name is rendered as “Karkamiš” in the title of Cornelius’ chapter in the table of contents and as “Carchemish” everywhere else it appears) or different preferences in transliterating or translating titles. Some potentially helpful items are absent from the Index of Subjects: “ruins” is not included, for example, and the pages listed under “ruinscape” do not include Berlejung’s extensive discussion of the ruins of Jericho, although cross-references to “landscape” and “memoryscape” would point the reader to Berlejung’s chapter.
For essays that include figures, high-quality images are printed within the text of the chapter. The two contributions focusing directly on material evidence (Cornelius and Arrington) are well-illustrated by color photographs and drawings, although some chapters without images would have benefitted from illustration: for example, when Yates describes the remains of temples damaged in the Persian sack as having been “conspicuously built into the new retaining walls” constructed on the Acropolis (191), an image of the visually incongruous column drums built into those walls would be an excellent supplement. The map at the start of Cornelius’ chapter (fig. 6.1) is helpful for orienting readers to the area of the city-states discussed there; similar maps would be beneficial in other chapters for readers unfamiliar with, for example, significant sites in the Jordan River Valley (chapters 2 and 3) or where battles occurred on Hannibal’s route through Italy (chapter 11), and maps for the volume would help readers visualize the spatial relationship of locations discussed in different chapters.
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.
Authors and Titles
Preface (Sonja Ammann, Helge Bezold, Stephen Germany, Julia Rhyder)
- Introduction (Sonja Ammann)
- The Ruins of Jericho (Joshua 6) and the Memorialization of Violence (Angelika Berlejung)
- Memorializing Saul’s Wars in Samuel and Chronicles (Stephen Germany)
- Fighting Annihilation: The Justification of Collective Violence in the Book of Esther and in Its Cultural Context (Helge Bezold)
- Hellenizing Hanukkah: The Commemoration of Military Victory in the Books of the Maccabees (Julia Rhyder)
- Memories of Violence in the Material Imagery of Karkamiš and Sam’al: The Motifs of Severed Heads and the Enemy Under Chariot Horses (Izak Cornelius)
- Israel’s Violence in Egypt’s Cultural Memory (Antonio Loprieno)
- Real Fights and Burlesque Parody: The Depiction of Violence in the Inaros Cycle (Damien Agut-Labordère)
- Material Responses to Collective Violence in Classical Greece (Nathan T. Arrington)
- Remembering and Forgetting the Sack of Athens (David C. Yates)
- The Darkest Hour (?): Military Defeats during the Second Punic War in Roman Memory Culture (Simon Lentzsch)
- Rebellious Narratives, Repeat Engagements, and Roman Historiography (Jessica H. Clark)
Notes
[1] The total of twelve contributions includes the detailed introduction by Sonja Ammann, which is given a chapter number along with the titled essays.
[2] For example, the long list of abbreviations at the start of the volume covers standard reference works across different disciplines and the index of ancient sources at the back is sorted into Aramaic and Hebrew, Egyptian, and Greek and Latin sources.
[3] Notably, as Bezold points out, this “supraregional presence” (75) is not only acknowledged within the text but even becomes an argument by the Persian courtier Haman against dismissing their ability to meaningfully oppose the empire; within the narrative, the inability to engage in open warfare is not expected to prevent large-scale collective violence.
[4] For example, “Plur.” is printed for “Plut.” in the index entry for the Vita Fabii (279), “Maccabee” for “Maccabees” in the title of Doran 2016 (89).