10.10.2023

International team of researchers analyzed over 3,500 skulls found in the Middle East – In the 12,000 years before antiquity, the share of violent death rose at first and then fell back

The development of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and the Middle East led to a substantial increase in violence between inhabitants. Laws, centralized administration, trade and culture then caused the ratio of violent deaths to fall back again in the Early and Middle Bronze Age (3,300 to 1,500 BCE). This is the conclusion of an international team of researchers from the Universities of Tübingen, Barcelona and Warsaw. Their results were published on Monday in Nature Human Behaviour.

The researchers examined 3,539 skeletons from the region that today covers Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Turkey for bone trauma which could only have occurred through violence. This enabled them to draw a nuanced picture of the development of interpersonal violence in the period 12,000 to 400 BCE. The period was characterized by such fundamental changes in human history as the development of agriculture, leaving behind the nomadic lifestyle, and the building of the first cities and states. 

“The ratio of interpersonal violence – i.e. of murder – peaked in the period of 4,500 to 3,300 years BCE and then fell back again over the course of the next 2,000 years,” says Joerg Baten from the Chair of Economic History at the University of Tübingen, wh