A groundbreaking analysis of the arts of war in ancient Mesopotamia
Rituals of War is an investigation into the earliest historical records of violence and biopolitics. In ancient Iraq (ca.3000-500 BC) rituals of war and images of violence constituted part of the magical technologies of warfare that formed the underlying irrational processes of war. Building on Michel Foucault’s argument in Discipline and Punish that the art of punishing must rest on a technology of representation, Zainab Bahrani investigates the ancient Mesopotamian record to reveal how that culture relied on the portrayal of violence and control as part of the mechanics of warfare. Moreover, she takes up the more recent arguments of Giorgio Agamben on sovereign power and biopolitics to focus on the relationship of power, the body and violence in Assyro-Babylonian texts and monuments of war. Bahrani brings together and analyzes facets of war and sovereign power that fall under the categories of representation and display, the aesthetic, the ritualistic, and the supernatural. The author describes these as the magical technologies of war, the realm of the irrational that enables the ideologies of just war in the distant past as well as today.
