Ricerc@Sapienza

War in the Ancient Near East has been (and it still is) a preferred theme of research by scholars who have been analyzing the composition and formation of the armies, the way war was fought and therefore the different techniques and strategies of fighting. Attention has in fact principally focused on the interests of the analysts in deciphering the impact and function of war on ancient societies, often, if not always, seen from the perspective of the people who promoted and, consequently, won the war; in this respect, we do not in fact rely upon large quantities of data and materials and in particular we mostly rely upon the same kind of information, that is the images and inscriptions of those Mesopotamian elites who fostered their military success and codified the narrative of the victory through fixed terms and pictures (and it is interesting how those codes of narrating war can be recognized across time from the 4th to the 1st millennium BC in what we could define as a catalogue of situations and actions).