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Violence trends in the ancient Middle East between 12,000 and 400 bce

Nature Human Behaviour volume 7, pages 2064–2073 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

How did interpersonal violence develop in early human societies? Given that homicide records are only available for the more recent period, much of human history remains outside our purview. In this paper, we study violence trends in the very long run by exploiting a new dataset on cranial trauma and weapon-related wounds from skeletons excavated across the Middle East, spanning the pre-Classical period (around 12,000–400 bce). The dataset includes more than 3,500 individuals. We find evidence that interpersonal violence peaked during the Chalcolithic period (around 4,500–3,300 bce). It then steadily declined during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages (around 3,300–1,500 bce) and increased again between the Late Bronze and the Iron Age (1,500–400 bce). By documenting variations in violence patterns across a vast temporal and geographical scale in an incredibly rich historical setting, we broaden perspectives on the early history of human conflict.

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Fig. 1: Distribution of Middle Eastern archaeological sites that provided bioarchaeological evidence for the present study.
Fig. 2: Trends in violent trauma in the study sample.
Fig. 3: Share of violence in the four regions (percentage of individual human remains).
Fig. 4: The estimates of the number of buried weapons between the Chalcolithic and the Middle Bronze Age.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available in the publicly accessible Zenodo repository at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8010025 and in the Supplementary Data.

Code availability

Custom code that supports the findings of this study is available in the publicly accessible Zenodo repository at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8010025. The Stata code is also available in the Supplementary Code.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Canci, W. Pestle, J. N. Postgate, E. M. Luby, G. Gernez and J. Nassar for having shared with us relevant published and unpublished materials and J. Anstett, G. Chignoli, B. Jung, S. Litzenberger, J. Seebacher and M. Stoppel for valuable research assistance. We acknowledge funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), Collaborative Research Centre ResourceCultures—SFB 1070/3—Project number 215859406 (J.B. and G.B.) and from the Maria Zambrano 2021 programme (G.B.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Joerg Baten

  2. Faculty of Economics and Business, Department of Economic History, Institutions, Politics and World Economy, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Giacomo Benati

  3. Faculty of Archaeology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

    Arkadiusz Sołtysiak

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Contributions

J.B. and G.B. conceptualized this work. J.B., G.B. and A.S. developed the methodology. J.B., G.B. and A.S. undertook the investigations. J.B. and G.B. prepared the visualizations. J.B. acquired funding and carried out the project administration. G.B. wrote the original draft. J.B. and A.S. reviewed and edited the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Giacomo Benati.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Andrea Dolfini, Linda Fibigier, Pauline Grosjean, Roger Matthews, Scott Ortman and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Supplementary Methods, robustness and sensitivity tests, literature review and Appendixes A–C.

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Baten, J., Benati, G. & Sołtysiak, A. Violence trends in the ancient Middle East between 12,000 and 400 bce. Nat Hum Behav 7, 2064–2073 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01700-y

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