Understanding the decline of interpersonal violence in the ancient middle east Abstract: How did human societies succeed in reducing interpersonal violence, a precondition to achieve security and prosperity? Given that homicide records are only available for the more recent period, much of human history remains virtually outside our purview. To fill this gap, a literature intersecting economics, archaeology, and anthropology has devised reliable methods for studying traumas deliberately inflicted in human skeletal remains. In this paper we reconstruct the early history of conflict by exploiting a novel dataset on weapon-related wounds from skeletons excavated across the Middle East, spanning the whole pre-Classical period (ca. 8,000-400 BCE). By documenting when and how ancient Middle Eastern populations managed to reduce intersocietal violence and achieve remarkable levels of development, we broaden historical perspectives on the structural factors driving human conflict

Benati, Giacomo; Baten, Joerg; Soltysiak, Arkadiusz

Understanding the decline of interpersonal violence in the ancient middle east Abstract: How did human societies succeed in reducing interpersonal violence, a precondition to achieve security and prosperity? Given that homicide records are only available for the more recent period, much of human history remains virtually outside our purview. To fill this gap, a literature intersecting economics, archaeology, and anthropology has devised reliable methods for studying traumas deliberately inflicted in human skeletal remains. In this paper we reconstruct the early history of conflict by exploiting a novel dataset on weapon-related wounds from skeletons excavated across the Middle East, spanning the whole pre-Classical period (ca. 8,000-400 BCE). By documenting when and how ancient Middle Eastern populations managed to reduce intersocietal violence and achieve remarkable levels of development, we broaden historical perspectives on the structural factors driving human conflict

Giacomo Benati (), Joerg Baten and Arkadiusz Soltysiak ()
Additional contact information
Giacomo Benati: Universitat de Barcelona
Arkadiusz Soltysiak: Warsaw University

No 2022/424, UB School of Economics Working Papers from University of Barcelona School of Economics

Keywords: Historical conflict; Middle East; preindustrial economies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N15 N35 N45 N55 O15 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-evo and nep-his
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