/ News, Research, Doctorate/PhD

Collective volume published as part of the SNSF project «Transforming Memories of Collective Violence in the Hebrew Bible»

Buchumschlag Collective Violence and Memory

The editors Sonja Ammann, Helge Bezold, Stephen Germany, and Julia Rhyder have published a collective volume titled «Collective Violence and Memory in the Ancient Mediterranean» in the series «Culture and History of the Ancient Near East» (Brill).

This book reveals how violent pasts were constructed by ancient Mediterranean societies, the ideologies they served, and the socio-political processes and institutions they facilitated. Combining case studies from Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, Israel/Judah, and Rome, it moves beyond essentialist dichotomies such as “victors” and “vanquished” to offer a new paradigm for studying representations of past violence across diverse media, from funerary texts to literary works, chronicles, monumental reliefs, and other material artefacts such as ruins. It thus paves the way for a new comparative approach to the study of collective violence in the ancient world.