Postwar Rituals of Return and Reintegration

Kelle, Brad E.

doi:10.2307/j.ctt6wqb3g.15

Cited by 7 publications

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“…In a similar vein, Brad Kelle (2014) has recently suggested that post-battle ritual acts, such as ritual purification or the creation of monuments, served the purpose of helping soldiers to overcome any "moral injury" that they had sustained during warfare. He defines "moral injury" as (Kelle 2014: 233): "experiences of guilt, shame, and moral and ethical ambiguity that result from a sense of having 'transgressed one's basic moral identity,' abandoned one's ethical standing as a decent person, and lost any reliable, meaningful world in which to live."…”

Section: 1: I 104-105)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Us Against Them: Ideological and Psychological Aspects of Ashurnasirpal Ii's Campaign Against Assyrian Rebels in Ḫalziluḫa

Dewar¹

2020

Iraq

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This paper is a study of the rebellion against the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II in the city of Ḫalziluḫa in 882 bc, which is an unusual instance of a rebellion by Assyrians being recorded in the Assyrian royal inscriptions. This paper explores the significance of the rebellion from two angles: the ideological problem of rebellion by Assyrians, and the psychological impact on Assyrian troops of killing their fellow Assyrians. Within the ideology of the royal inscriptions, Assyrians did not normally rebel against the incumbent king, who was in all ways presented as a model ruler. It will be argued that Ashurnasirpal therefore made efforts in his inscriptions to stress that the Assyrian rebels in Ḫalziluḫa inhabited territory that had been lost to Assyria prior to his reign, and had become “de-Assyrianised” and “uncivilised.” It will be argued that a similar message was conveyed to the Assyrian soldiers through the ceremonies surrounding the creation of a monument at the source of the River Subnat, and that this message helped the soldiers to “morally disengage” from the act of killing other Assyrians, thus avoiding “moral self-sanctions” for an otherwise morally problematic act.

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Section: 1: I 104-105)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Us Against Them: Ideological and Psychological Aspects of Ashurnasirpal Ii's Campaign Against Assyrian Rebels in Ḫalziluḫa

Dewar¹

2020

Iraq

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“…While the order/chaos framework continues to be prominent, there is no doubt an increasing amount of variety in approaches to war and violence in the ancient Near East. For example, Cynthia R. Chapman’s 2004 work on warfare focalizes gender; my recent book on violence addresses issues of personhood, gender, and social status (Lemos 2017); a recent essay by Saul M. Olyan examines instrumental dimensions of ritual violence (2015); and works by Brad E. Kelle have dealt with moral injury and violence (2014, 2015, 2020). What is interesting is that despite the increasing diversity, one sees hardly any engagement with the concept of ‘structural violence’ or other new materialist approaches.…”

Section: The Study Of Violence Among Scholars Of the Ancient Near Eastmentioning

confidence: 99%

Order from Chaos: Comparing Approaches to Violence in Anthropology, Assyriology, and the Study of the Hebrew Bible

Lemos

2020

Currents in Biblical Research

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This article compares the history of scholarship on violence in anthropology in the past one hundred years to major approaches to studying violence in the ancient Near East and ancient Near Eastern sources, including ancient Israel and Israelite literature. The article demonstrates that anthropology and ancient Near Eastern studies have diverged widely in their approaches to violence. In the past two to three decades, the concept of structural violence and new materialist approaches have dominated the study of violence in anthropology, while in Assyriology and the study of ancient Israel/Israelite literature, studies of violence have repeatedly turned to an order and chaos framework. The article ends by suggesting that scholars of ancient West Asia incorporate new materialist approaches more concertedly in studies of violence and either rethink or jettison the simplistic order/chaos dyad.

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“…Rituals performed at the army's muster and before it crossed into enemy territory also helped soldiers transition mentally from the constraints of peacetime living, with its prohibition against killing, to the physical demands and moral license of wartime (Mayer ; Kelle ). The administration of loyalty oaths and the king's formal review of the troops helped to give soldiers a sense of purpose that, in turn, created some sense of corporate identity.…”

Section: Divinationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although the Assyrians did not shy away from violence, which they regarded as both necessary and justified, they did recognize that it had to be controlled. Like most ancient societies, the Assyrians believed that those who committed violent acts had to cleanse themselves in order to reintegrate into peacetime society (Oded , p. 15; Kelle , p. 223). Cleansing rituals not only helped soldiers refocus after the adrenalin rush and chaos of combat but also facilitated their leaders' efforts to reestablish authority over them.…”

Section: Purification and Thanksgivingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Role of Rituals in Warfare during the Neo‐Assyrian Period

Melville

2016

Religion Compass

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In imperial Assyria during the first millennium BCE, ritual pervaded every aspect of life. As the link between the divine realm and the earthly one, the king's primary duty was to discover the gods' will and enact it. To this end, an array of ritual experts in the art of reading and reacting to divine signs aided the king. Due to the risk involved, warfare required particular attention from the experts during every phase of operations. Based on evidence from cuneiform sources (ritual texts, royal inscriptions, and letters) and monumental art (narrative sculptured reliefs), this article focuses on how ritual activity at each campaign stage affected different audiences, including the enemy, the king's officials, and the Assyrian army. Introduction: Warfare as a Ritual ActivityLike many other cultures, those of the ancient Near East turned to myth and religion to come to terms with the violent contradictions inherent in war, which brought benefit to some and disaster to others, according to the will of the gods. On the positive side, the creation myth, Enuma Elish, taught that the god, Marduk, established order over chaos by killing the primordial monster, Tiamat, in combat (Foster 2005, pp. 436-86;Noegel 2007). By contrast, Erra and Ishum, the story of an angry god run amuck, warned against waging war without restraint or a just cause (Foster 2005, pp. 880-913;George 2013). Despite the ambivalent attitude to war, no one seriously questioned its necessity. Rather, the ancients reasoned that when a mortal king waged war correctly and for legitimate reasons, he did so on behalf of his gods in order to defend cosmic order. Nor did people distinguish between the sacred and profane as we do. They believed in a single reality in which political action and religious action coalesced. Hence, the prevailing understanding of the cosmos, coupled with associated royal ideology, justified and gave meaning to all the king's political activities, especially warfare.At the height of their power from the 9th to the 7th centuries BCE, the Assyrians held similarly that a divinely appointed king, the 'viceroy of Ashur', acted as the intermediary between the cosmic realm and the earthly one, which encompassed both civilized lands under Assyrian sovereignty and dangerous enemy regions that awaited pacification. The king's duty was to enact the gods' will on earth through conquest and just administration. The gods communicated their bidding to him through celestial omina and all kinds of physical signs, whose meaning was revealed to trained professionals through ritual observation and interpretation of the appropriate scholarly compendia (Rochberg 2004, pp. 44-97). For his part, the king fulfilled the divine instructions obtained through divination by maintaining cults and temples, performing rituals, and by waging war. According to this system of thought, victory signaled the gods' approval; setbacks withdrawal of support. Thus imbued with cosmic significance, war becamein the broadest sensea ritualized activity, an 'ordalic procedure' t...

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Postwar Rituals of Return and Reintegration

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Us Against Them: Ideological and Psychological Aspects of Ashurnasirpal Ii's Campaign Against Assyrian Rebels in Ḫalziluḫa

Us Against Them: Ideological and Psychological Aspects of Ashurnasirpal Ii's Campaign Against Assyrian Rebels in Ḫalziluḫa

Order from Chaos: Comparing Approaches to Violence in Anthropology, Assyriology, and the Study of the Hebrew Bible

The Role of Rituals in Warfare during the Neo‐Assyrian Period

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