Warfare and violence were central to the identity and experience of early states in the ancient Near East.

The archaeological evidence shows that violence and warfare characterised these societies long before writing was invented in the late fourth millennium bce, but we gain a much richer ability to assess their impact on these communities with the benefit of the docu­mentary record.

For the ancient Mesopotamians, violence was to be found everywhere, both in nature and in society. Southern Mesopotamia, in the south of modern Iraq, is where historians find their first evidence for studying the develop­ment of complex society. The earliest surviving written records were con­cerned with the affairs of the state, and therefore much of our focus in this investigation will be on the connections between violence and the state. The history of the ancient Near East in the cuneiform record runs from the late fourth millennium bce down to the first century ce, but this chapter concentrates on the rise of kingdoms in Mesopotamia and their relationship with violence and warfare in the first half of this long era.

Historians define early Mesopotamia as the period from the beginning of the third millennium bce down to the middle of the second millennium bce. In political terms this is the period when Mesopotamia went from being a land of dozens of independent city-states to a large kingdom ruled from the great city of Babylon. As will be shown, the growth of these large kingdoms was experimental at first, and was closely connected to royal ideology and the exercise of violence. A significant aspect of this story, and a key factor in the rise of the state, was its relationship to warfare and violence.

The people of Mesopotamia created a very rich documentary record in antiquity covering more than 3,000 years. This record provides an abundance of sources related to violence and warfare.

Our ability to engage historically with this topic flows fundamentally from its prominence in the surviving record of royal inscriptions. This emphasis makes clear the centrality of violence to the growth of the state and to the expansion of royal authority. Indeed, I will argue that a rhetoric of state- sponsored violence developed in Mesopotamia that guided countless gen­erations of behaviour. As a result, this is predominantly a history from above. In part because the legitimate exercise of violence was the exclusive domain of the state, we have relatively few documents that provide us with a sense of more mundane encounters with violence in daily life. However, the state's administrative response to violence, in particular the recording of booty, tribute and the casualties of royal campaigns, allows us to the see the economies of violence and warfare and their impact on daily life.

This chapter is divided into three basic parts. First, I will introduce a series of related topics that help us to understand how violence and warfare were imagined and understood in early Mesopotamia. This examination will include a discussion of how violence was defined, what its relationship was to the divine, and how this was connected to the growth of royal authority and the juridical conception of violence. Second, I will discuss violence in its early historical context by examining cycles of violence related to the growth of the state. Here we will look at the expansion of ideas of political commu­nity and their connection to military campaigns and the booty that those campaigns produced. The economics of warfare in early Mesopotamia was intrinsically linked to its violence. The armies sent into the periphery often returned with large numbers of human prisoners and livestock. In some cases, the booty generated by state-sponsored violence created a parallel economy based around concepts of tribute and patronage, and on which some Mesopotamian societies came to depend. Finally, I will briefly examine the later development of these kingdoms of violence and the royal rhetoric that accompanied their creation and expansion.