Program > By author > Selim Firat Sağlam

Organized violence inside and outside groups is witnessed in Europe since the Early Neolithic (VI millennium BC) and is increasingly regularized in the Copper Age (III millennium BC) with the rise of warriors recognized as such by their people in their status symbol (Bell Beaker Culture) and with the appearance of the first objects conceived and produced exclusively as weapons (swords) in the Bronze Age (2nd millennium BC). Precisely in the Late Bronze Age (1300-700 BC), hillforts have also appeared systematically for the first time overall in Europe, which mark the will of each human group not only to identify themselves in a territory to be defend, but also to underline the presence of a strong local power. For all these periods, however, there are no state-owned societies, with central power able to organize for the conflict an entire territory concerning more territories, but societies that go through increasingly complex phases of chiefdom or an autonomous political unit that includes a number of villages or communities under the permanent control of a leader. Archeology has a lot of material data available, but to summarize archaeological data needs still current examples of political units of today which are not organized as a state but which are managed by leaders. The Kurdish people have about 45 million individuals, spread over a large territory politically belonging to 4 states, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran: the cultural and political fragmentation and persecution has not completely quelled a strong common cultural matrix, very ancient and extremely rich and characterized, stubbornly handed down for a large part as a cultural heritage passed down orally. In rural areas there are still pockets of cultural resistance, especially where the established power (the State is also geographically more distant, where the management of community life and the inevitable conflicts of different kinds still takes place following the unwritten laws of tradition, in to which the decisive word belongs to the council of elders and the word has the value of the legal seal. The example of the Kurdish political organization can be a good ethno-archaeological comparison for understand several problems to protohistoric societies.

The work consists in giving a view of the panorama that we have of pre and pre-historic societies organized in chiefdom through materials and contexts in the warfare field, to compare them with the non-state political organization of the Kurds today and to try to give an idea of organization of the conflict in ancient non-state societies.