Objective
Violence is often treated as a timeless crisis, yet its forms and frequencies were historically contingent. Interpersonal harm reveals how communities organised power, negotiated status, and defined wrongdoing. Ancient Mesopotamia, with three millennia of cuneiform archives, offers an unparalleled record.
The project’s main goal is to deliver the first comprehensive view and understanding of the extent, role, and variability of interpersonal violence in Mesopotamia. Its framework rests on four questions: Who was involved, Where it occurred, When it rose or declined, and How was it experienced and resolved. Together, these provide a historically grounded, evidence-led account that replaces fragmentary or elite-centred narratives with a reconstruction of everyday conflict.
Rather than repeating stories of royal conquest, I examine disputes of non‑elites, analysing c. 40,000 Sumerian and Akkadian letters and legal texts. These sources show how violence clustered socially, temporally, and spatially, and how wider forces intensified or curtailed it.
Methodologically, the project fuses philological precision with digital tools. A curated lexicon of c. 900 violence terms drives a transformer‑based NLP workflow that tags agents, patients, places, and regnal dates in TEI‑encoded texts. Events are tied to a georeferenced Gazetteer for settlement‑level mapping. Bayesian models estimate incidence and risk across millennia, and micro‑historical dossiers add depth where statistics thin. All data, code, and visualisations will be released under open licences for reuse.
I hypothesise that interpersonal violence in Mesopotamia was rarer, more situational, and more negotiable than royal rhetoric suggests, shaped by status, gender, occupation, and locality. By uniting philology, NLP, spatial history, and statistics in a reproducible workflow, TENSION recalibrates Mesopotamian history and sets a methodological benchmark for studying violence in other text-rich pre-modern societies.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities history and archaeology history ancient history
- humanities languages and literature literature studies literary genres essays
- humanities languages and literature literature studies history of literature
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-ADG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
116 36 Praha 1
Czechia
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