Book excerpt: This book reveals how violent pasts were constructed by ancient Mediterranean societies, the ideologies they served, and the socio-political processes and institutions they facilitated. Combining case studies from Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, Israel/Judah, and Rome, it moves beyond essentialist dichotomies such as "victors" and "vanquished" to offer a new paradigm for studying representations of past violence across diverse media, from funerary texts to literary works, chronicles, monumental reliefs, and other material artefacts such as ruins. It thus paves the way for a new comparative approach to the study of collective violence in the ancient world.