The role of climate (including abrupt changes and extreme weather) in modern-era violence and conflict has received considerable attention in the past two decades from scholars in multiple fields, yet the mechanisms underlying (and even the reality of) such a role remains contested. Concern over projected climatic changes as a trigger for intensified violence, including mass killing and genocide, nonetheless continues to propel research. Data limitations are frequently cited as a challenge, yet comparatively few studies have turned to the millennia of human history documenting a broad range of violence against diverse social and environmental backgrounds. This chapter reviews evidence for ‘pathways’ by which climate may have contributed to violence and conflict in the Ancient Near East and Egypt. It emphasized religious, ideological, and ethnic dimensions that may have been catalysed by the psychological and material impacts of extreme weather to promote violence and conflict. In particular, we study state-enacted violence by the Neo-Assyrian Empire (909-611 BCE) and internal revolt in Ptolemaic Egypt (305-30 BCE). Newly available ice-core-based dates of explosive volcanism allow the examination of societal responses to the ensuing hydroclimatic shocks (also potentially ‘ominous’ volcanic dust-veils). These can be shown to closely precede documented increases in violence and conflict, including external warfare and internal revolt.

Tridents and bidents appear to have been used in early Italy as symbols of divinatory power associated with lightning and are known by the evidence of rare representations and actual metal objects placed in Italic rulers’ tombs of the eighth through the seventh centuries BCE (Golasecca and Etruria). Fragile or even deliberately blunted, these implements could really only be symbolic emblems, and two show evidence of intense destruction during the funerary ritual. A possibly analogous situation, with deeper roots in the Near East (especially Assyria, Urartu, and the Levant) may also have occurred in Anatolia, especially Phrygia (Gordion). A trident planted in the earth may have symbolized divination.

This essay investigates pre-battle omens and portents through three interpretative lenses: the ontological turn in anthropology, literary and historiographical criticism, and the cognitive science of religion. The Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC is used as a case study because Xenophon, Ephorus of Cyme, and Callisthenes of Olynthus recorded a uniquely large number of portents. Given that Leuctra fundamentally changed the balance of power in the Greek world, the various omens and portents described by our sources are fully consistent with the normative Greek worldview that signs were sent by the gods before important events. Scholars have been much more open to accepting that, despite some literary embellishment, the Greeks recognized omens retrospectively, but prospective omens are not improbable in a culture that was continually on the lookout for god-sent signs. The likelihood of prospective omens is confirmed by a comparative study of the omens that appeared to members of the Seventh Cavalry and to their Arikara scouts before the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. We must avoid projecting a post-Enlightenment understanding of reality onto other cultures, thus devaluing the human dependence on communication with supernatural powers that was so central to the experience of the ancient Greeks.