Conclusion

The representation of violence in both Mesopotamia and Syria had a cultural role and meaning at both religious and political levels. Indeed, the two are deeply intertwined and it is not possible to draw a sharp distinction.

In fact, it might be said that this distinction was not even experienced by the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia and Syria. Even when violence has a clear political use (for example, in war), aspects of rituality that conform to the religious sphere can be recognised. The head, for example, becomes the focus of all kinds of violence, but at the same time it undergoes a series of rites so as to vanquish its power once it has been detached from the body. In this respect, pictures of violence are often the result of the assimilation and elaboration of themes that have a long-lasting tradition: for that reason, from the fourth to the first millennia bce codified scenes of violence can be recognised and singled out. They show similar and recurrent figurative motifs and we can therefore speak of a visual pattern of violence. This probably depended on the fact that the message needed to be immediate and clear to each viewer, and it was therefore based on a common shared visual language.

Pictures show details of the pain of others and the brutal modalities human beings invented and perfected to inflict suffering and cause death, but how were they seen and experienced? Notwithstanding the limits of our comprehension of the ancient audience, it cannot be totally excluded that these pictures targeted a special public, except on some occasion when people were introduced to the front of pictures showing the details of torture and death. In the first instance, if we think of the Assyrian palace reliefs, for example, the king himself and his court were the primary audience: in this context, any propagandistic conclusion should be revised as it would be odd to think of the Assyrian king trying to persuade and convince himself.^{^[1216]} Thus the idea of the aesthetic of violence was firstly directed to an inner audience, that is, the king and the members of his court: the long walls of the rooms of the Assyrian palaces, particularly in the Sargonid period (eighth to seventh centuries bce), were extensively covered with slabs depicting the military campaigns of the king with the registration of details of violence against people, animals, the environment and monuments. Assyrian reliefs were not works of art to be admired, nor were the Assyrian palaces museums.

At the same time the Mesopotamian temples of the third millennium bce (where monuments celebrating wars and showing scenes of violence were presented to the gods) were also not buildings open to the general public: again, the aesthetic of violence, the exaltation and fascination for violent pictures, were directed at an inner and very specific audience. Within the Mesopotamian temples, the gods had direct evidence of the actions of the kings: violence, particularly in warfare, was necessary to succeed and it might in fact be said that violence was, in a certain sense, sacralised. The violent actions of the kings in fact refer to and even imitate the use of violence of the gods as it is narrated in the Mesopotamian myths: as a paradigmatic example, the death and dismemberment of the body of the antagonists in the Epic of the Creation and the poem Atrahasis are essential to establish the new reality, the creation of the world and the origin of humankind.

Violence is a need and a natural impulse of human beings against other people, animals and things. The representation of violence transforms that act into a spectacle and into something that is fixed and enduring. As the Assyrian reliefs show, representations of violence are first directed to other pictures - an inner violence, a meta-violence - with pictures registering aggression and torture that happened in reality but that are now going on just on the ‘screen'. This violence was, however, necessary, at least in the eyes of those who committed it, and even authorised it: its representation in monuments guaranteed the preservation of memory through enactment, becoming a component that explained, justified and re-established the foundation of these societies.^{^[1217]}

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Source: Fagan Garrett G., Fibiger Linda, Hudson Mark, Trundle Matthew (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 1: The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 756 p.. 2020

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