War, Peace and Resilience in the Ancient World Narratives

Forthcoming, 2026

Throughout their history, all cultures of the ancient world experienced periods of war and peace, demonstrating great resilience in overcoming long battles or in restoring the social order destroyed by the conflicts. Since man is a homo narrans and narration is one of the main means he uses to organise the reality in which he lives, even war and peace have been explained and made intelligible through processes of narration.

Taking into account that religion is as well subjected to continuous narrative processes, this book investigates how and to what extent religious elements were used to narrate peace and war in various cultures of the ancient world. In particular, the different essays reflect on: the role assigned to specific extra-human agents in the outbreak of wars or in the stipulation of peace pacts; the reuse of known mythical motifs to explicate, justify, or establish war and peace; the narration of the relationships between political and military leaders with religious practitioners and extra-human agents; the creation ad hoc of new narratives featuring extra-human agents as main characters of war and peace.