Fear Written Large: Systematic Warfare and the Ancient Empire of Urartu

Summary

This paper presents a Landscapes of Warfare case study, combining textual documentation, archeological data and GIS analysis to elucidate the effects of pervasive warfare on the development of Urartu, a highland empire that existed in the ancient Near East in the 1st Millennium BCE. Specifically, I argue that forts, fortresses and fortified settlements were strategically placed for both defensive communication as well as the systematic surveillance of roads. The paper contributes to scholarly debates by showing that the evidence for systematic warfare conveyed by Neo-Assyrian texts and images stands in contrast to the primarily economic and ecological explanatory models offered to explain regional phenomena, indicating a need to integrate historical evidence with archaeological explanation. I conclude that signatures of warfare are discernible in landscape studies, and that GIS reconstructions provide powerful tools for evaluating them.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20308