Warfare in the EBA to the Beginning of the LBA

This volume interrogates the nature of warfare in the Aegean world during the Bronze Age, reviews the essential forms of evidence, considers the social and cultural place of war, and revisits some longstanding questions. Fortifications, weaponry, and iconography are being considered in Chapters 2, 3, and 5, and so I am taking a broadly discursive perspective. The reader is referred to those chapters for detailed treatment of the material evidence. I am also going to consider conflict in a more general sense. This is largely focused on warfare, but I emphasize that our physical evidence for the events of war can frequently be ambiguous or unrecognizable in the archaeological record. Taking the example of fortifications, they represent conflict in several ways, from the definition of enforced inside and outside spaces, claims to visual prominence in a landscape symbolizing dominance of that landscape, potentially subjugation of populations used to build them, visual challenges to hostile neighbors, and so on. The point here is that we should view warfare as part of a sliding scale of social discord in ancient societies, and so it must be viewed within the wider context of social strategies for conflict management. Such management can be ideological, as with my characterization of fortifications, but such ideologies are of necessity grounded in the ability to back them up by brute force and violence.