Kurt A. Raaflaub
This volume contains the revised proceedings of a lecture series and colloquium on “War, Peace, and Reconciliation in the Ancient World” that the Program in Ancient Studies organized at Brown University in 2002-3.1 The papers presented at these events covered nine early civilizations from China via India and West Asia to the Mediterranean and Mesoamerica. They offered illuminating glimpses into a rarely treated topic. Other contributors joined our enterprise later on. I am most grateful to all of them and to many others whose help was indispensable in organizing the events and preparing the publication.2 This introduction intends, on the one hand, to sketch the background of endemic war, violence, and brutality, against which we must assess thoughts about peace and efforts to preserve or re-establish peace in the ancient world, and, on the other hand, to survey some of the common traits that are visible in several ancient cultures.
“Ancient” is here understood in a broad sense, including some societies that are structurally “early” but transcend the commonly accepted chronological boundaries of antiquity (wherever one chooses to place those). “Peace” is an equally imprecise, or perhaps rather a polyvalent notion. It is here understood primarily in contrast to war (hence the volume’s title), but it is clear that this contrast covers only part of the term’s range of meanings. In some ancient cultures, indeed, other meanings were more important. Several contributors (Salomon, Konstan, and Barton, among others) discuss these issues as well as relevant terminology. To give just two examples, the ancient Egyptians were primarily interested in peace as a domestic issue, visible in the integrity of the country and the absence of internal strife; compared with this ideal, peace with the outside world was less significant. Accordingly, the condition of perpetual peace offered to pharaohs by the gods referred to the domestic sphere, and even in the treaty with the Hittites (Bell, this vol.), the result of peace was expressed in the statement that the two countries had become one (Helck 1977). By contrast, the concept of peace that became pervasive in ancient Indian culture was internal and referred to peace of mind and spirit (Salomon, this vol.).
Experts on war in the ancient world are numerous, those on peace hard to find; the bibliographies differ accordingly. Moreover, in books on peace in the ancient world, “ancient” is usually limited to the Greeks and Romans. This volume, to my knowledge, is one of only two that examine the issue of peace on a global scale.
World History
