Rituals of War is an investigation into the earliest historical
records of violence and biopolitics. In Mesopotamia, ancient (ca.
3000-500 BCE) Iraqi rituals of war and images of violence
constituted part of the magical technologies of warfare that formed
the underlying irrational processes of war. In Rituals of War,
Zainab Bahrani weaves together three lines of inquiry into one
historical domain of violence: war, the body, and representation.
Building on Foucault's argument in Discipline and Punish that the
art of punishing must rest on a whole technology of representation,
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
analyzes facets of war and sovereign power that fall under the
categories of representation and display, the aesthetic, the
ritualistic, and the supernatural. Besides the invention of the
public monument of war and the rituals of iconoclasm, destruction,
and relocation of monuments in war, she investigates formulations
of power through the body, narrative displays in battle, the
reading of omens before the battle, and historical divination
through the body and body parts. Bahrani 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
today.Zainab Bahrani is Edith Porada Professor of Ancient Near
Eastern Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She is
the author of The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and
Assyria and Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in
Mesopotamia.
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