Violence & Imagination after the Collapse

Encounters, Identity & Daily Life in the Upper Euphrates Region, 3200-2500 BCE

Sanders, Akiva

In the late fourth millennium BCE, the villages, temples, and palace of the Upper Euphrates region stood between two social worlds: the comparatively hierarchical, centrally organized Mesopotamian social tradition to the south and the comparatively egalitarian, decentralized Kura-Araxes social tradition to the north. Over the next seven centuries, this positioning and the interactions it sparked fed into reactions among the region’s inhabitants that ranged from cataclysmic violence to a flowering of innovation in visual culture and social arrangements. These events had a wide array of short-term and long-term impacts, some limited to a single house or settlement, and some, like the innovation of the Warrior Tomb template, that transformed societies across West Asia. With an eye towards detail, a theoretical approach emphasizing personal motivation, and multiple scales of analysis, this book organizes previously unpublished data from six sites in the region, Arslantepe, Ta kun Mevkii, Pulur, Nor untepe, Tepecik, and Korucutepe, dating to this dramatic and transformative period.