Community and State Violence in Middle Bronze Age Mesopotamia

Abstract Violence stands at the core of many theories about how early societies worked. Assumptions that violence was widely used in both state and private arenas—to regulate competition, enact symbolic orders, and/or manifest “primitive” social forms—are common in many explanations of how state society worked. But an analysis of the forms, representation, and distribution of violence in Mesopotamian Bronze Age cultures shows that state and community violence was rare in fact. Taking into account the literary-generic production of violent imagery, the negative political value of using violence, and the pervasive low-level structural violence of household orders, we conclude that a concern for reputation and potential exclusion from communities were far more powerful forms of policing and sanction than was violence.