Violence & Imagination after the Collapse

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

By (author) Akiva Sanders

Book cover: Violence & Imagination after the Collapse

Extent: 306 pages

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Subjects: Ancient Near East

Series: Subartu

Series volume number: 52

Language: English

Paperback (Published)

(August 2024)

ISBN: 9782503609454

Price: $163.00

In stock

An investigation into the visual and social choices made by residents of the Upper Euphrates region, ca. 3200-2500 BCE. The villages of this region were situated between the Upper Mesopotamian and the Kura-Araxes cultural traditions, whose deep differences in social organization strike at the heart of what it means to be a human comm


In the late fourth millennium BCE, the villages, temples, and palace of the Upper Euphrates region stood between two social traditions: the comparatively hierarchical, centrally organized Mesopotamian social world to the south and the comparatively egalitarian, decentralized Kura-Araxes social sphere to the north. Over the next seven centuries, this positioning and the interactions it sparked fed into a wide variety of reactions among the region’s inhabitants, ranging 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detail, a theoretical approach emphasizing motivation, and multiple scales of analysis, this book organizes previously unpublished data from six sites in the region, Arslantepe, Ta?kun Mevkii, Pulur, Nor?untepe, Tepecik, and Korucutepe, dating to this dramatic and transformative period.

  • By (author) Akiva Sanders