TY - BOOK ID - 3295885 TI - Rituals of war : the body and violence in Mesopotamia PY - 2008 SN - 9781890951849 1890951846 PB - New York : Cambridge : Zone Books ; Distributed by The MIT Press, DB - UniCat KW - Military history, Ancient. KW - History, Ancient. KW - Histoire militaire ancienne KW - Histoire ancienne KW - Iraq KW - Irak KW - History KW - Histoire KW - Militaire KW - Iconographie KW - Iconographie païenne KW - Violence KW - Politique KW - Corps humain, thème KW - Mésopotamie KW - Babylone KW - Violence (thème) KW - History, Ancient KW - Military history, Ancient KW - Ancient military history KW - Ancient history KW - Ancient world history KW - World history UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:3295885 AB - Rituals of War is an investigation into the earliest historical records of violence and biopolitics. In Mesopotamia, ancient Iraq (ca. 3000–500 BC) rituals of war and images of violence constituted part of the magical technologies of warfare that formed the underlying irrational processes of war. In the book, three lines of inquiry are converged into one historical domain of violence, namely, 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, Zainab 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 biopolitic to focus on the relationship of power, the body and violence in Assyro-Babylonian texts and monuments of war. ER -