Taxonomies of Interpersonal Violence in Ancient Mesopotamia

Objectif

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.