Over the last few months, we have released a series of podcasts featuring members of the Ancient Peace Studies Network – to highlight different aspects of ancient peace history.
- Introducing the Ancient Peace Studies Network: In this episode, guest-host Zofia Guertin speaks with Prof. Alice König about her work expanding the Visualising War project to include peace studies. Discover why peace narratives have received far less scholarly attention than war stories, and how Prof. König’s team is working to change that by investigating whose voices and experiences are reflected in ancient accounts of peace and reconciliation.
- Peace and Peacemaking in ancient Greece and Rome: This episode dives deep into ancient peace history, as Alice interviews Professor Polly Low, from Durham University, and Dr Hannah Cornwell, from the University of Birmingham. Polly and Hannah discuss the sources available to us, whose experiences of peace they particularly foreground, and what they can tell us about how ideas of peace evolved across antiquity. We consider the relationship between peacemaking and imperialism, habits of truce-making, the intricacies of diplomacy, and peace as a performance. The episode covers several hundred years of history, considering civil war contexts as well as interstate relations, and differences between democratic Athens and Rome under the Principate.
- Peace and Peacebuilding in ancient Persia: In this episode, Alice interviews Professor John Hyland and Dr Rhyne King. Together, they dig into different conceptualisations of peace and peacebuilding across the Achaemenid Persian Empire, exploring it both from a domestic viewpoint and in the light of interstate relations. We touch on sources such as the famous Cyrus Cylinder, and its ongoing resonance in Iranian identity-building and international politics today. And we explore the peace rhetoric of kings such as Darius I, as seen in e.g. the Bīsotūn monument. The conversation considers the relationship between peace and order, peace and the gods, and peace and ‘paradise’; and we also discuss the insights which ancient Persian peace imaginaries might offer on modern concepts and practices.
- Visualising Troy beyond the warfighting: In this episode Alice interviews Dr Stephan Blum, a Research Associate at the Institute for Prehistory, Early History and Medieval Archaeology, at the University of Tübingen. Stephan is a member of the Troy Project, a long-running archaeological collaboration between the universities of Cincinnati and Tübingen, designed to shed more light on the physical remains and social history of one of the ancient world’s most evocative places. Troy is famous for the ten-year siege which Homer wrote about in The Iliad and The Odyssey – but this is only a fraction of the city’s 3000-year old story. In this episode, we discuss how Homer’s famous war stories have distorted our vision of ancient Troy and we consider what we can learn from its wider history. Stephan explains the challenges of looking for peace in the archaeological record, but he also underlines how much evidence we can find at Troy of conflict prevention, conflict resilience and post-conflict transformation. The result is a very different picture of a place that is almost synonymous with war in popular culture. Contextualising Troy’s war-torn reputation by excavating more of its peace history teaches us a lot about the dominance of conflict narratives as well as the value of looking for evidence of local, everyday and personal peace across antiquity.
- Hybrid peace in ancient Mesopotamia – what omens can tell us: n this episode Alice interviews Dr Seth Richardson, who is based at the University of Chicago and Managing Editor of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies. Seth’s research focuses on ancient Mesopotamia, and ranges widely over political and economic history, theories of state sovereignty, legitimacy, rebellion and insurgency, and all kinds of violence from war to non-state and community-level violence. This episode focuses particularly on what ancient Mesopotamian omens can tell us about how war, peace and everything between were understood and experienced from the ground up. Seth contrasts what elite-focused sources tell us about military ambition and imperial conquest with the more complex story painted by thousands of cuneiform tablets that shed light on everyday concerns. As he explains, banditry, civil unrest, environmental crises and disease seemed to loom much larger than major armed conflicts. In fact, the omens suggest that many in ancient Mesopotamia lived in a state of recurring insecurity – what Seth refers to as ‘hybrid peace’. Together, we discuss how excavating a ‘people’s history’ of ancient peace can significantly change how we visualise antiquity.