"From 'kingship in heaven' to king lists: Syro-Anatolian courts and the history of the world." Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12 (2012) 97-118. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Hittite Religious Rituals and the Ideology of Kingship
Religion Compass, 2011
What did the victorious Hittite king do on his return home from battle? Surprisingly perhaps, the pertinent Hittite sources offer different, even contradictory answers to this question. For a study of the relations between ritual practices and political power in the Hittite Kingdom, however, the question is not without interest. The occasion of the victorious return of the king from battle lends itself splendidly to, even calls for, a conscious use of ritual activity for the manifestation of political power. It will be argued that the evidence concerning the ritual activities of the Hittite king on his return from war show no conscious attempt to mould ritual practices into political goals or to exploit the glory of battles just won for a demonstration of power. This fact may shed a new light on the relations between ritual activity and political power in the context of the Hittite empire and its characteristic textual inheritance.
Ritual, Performance, and Politics in the Ancient Near East
2014
In this book, Lauren Ristvet rethinks the narratives of state formation by investigating the interconnections between ritual, performance, and politics in the ancient Near East. She draws on a wide range of archaeological, iconographic, and cuneiform sources to show how ritual performance was not set apart from the real practice of politics; it was politics. Rituals provided an opportunity for elites and ordinary people to negotiate political authority. Descriptions of rituals from three periods explore the networks of signification that informed different societies. From circa 2600 to 2200 BC, pilgrimage made kingdoms out of previously isolated villages. Similarly, from circa 1900 to 1700 BC, commemorative ceremonies legitimated new political dynasties by connecting them to a shared past. Finally, in the Hellenistic period, the traditional Babylonian Akitu festival was an occasion for Greek-speaking kings to show that they were Babylonian and for Babylonian priests to gain signific...
The relationship between objects, people, and places can be fundamental when the aim is to create forms of memorialization for the dead among the living. This is especially the case of ancient societies who left behind numerous traces that can be useful for scholars in reconstructing ancient religious beliefs and practices. In particular, archaeologists have used a social memory theoretical framework to enlarge the field of research to a broader agenda that, as emphasized by Andrew Jones, can help researchers in defining ‘how things and places helped societies remember’. Regarding funerary contexts, researchers have primarily directed their interest towards the definition of archaeological correlates that can help identify tangible elements to be associated with ancient cults of the ancestors. Even though the search for the cult of the ancestors can be both risky and tricky, this exercise can be particularly fruitful if the archaeological data are supported by written sources that better explain the role of the ancestors and how they were venerated and memorialized by a given society. For example, in the case of the ancient Near East the proliferation of texts dedicated to this topic can be found starting from the third millennium BCE. These texts are mostly concerned with the subject of royal or elite ancestor worship and it therefore appears of great importance to confront these textual evidences with archaeological data helpful for interpreting and reconstructing the ritual practices involved in the memorialization of royal ancestors. Of particular relevance for the topic investigated in this paper is the appearance of Royal Hypogea built underneath palaces, as well as mausolea that have marked the urban fabric of numerous ancient Near Eastern cities starting from the third and continuing until the first millennia BC. Thus, in this paper I will use a social memory theoretical framework as a tenet to be used in analysing two specific case studies from western Syria: the third millennium example available from Ebla, and the second millennium Royal Hypogeum discovered at Qatna. In this epistemological process I will use the written data to support my theoretical tenet that is based on the assumption that the creation of the memory of royal ancestors is pivotal for constructing the ‘charismatic authority’ of royal families and linking them to a cosmic dimension; because, as I mentioned in a previous publication, ‘in order to establish this authority, the leader’s charisma has to be communicated through a language based on the performance of rituals that assist the observer in connecting the royal domain with the divine one’. In this paper, I will especially focus on the investigation of the role of body memories in constructing forms of memorialization with an emphasis on how memories were incorporated by the social body through the practice of ritual journeys and convivial eating.
Ritual as Divine Law: The Case of Hittite Royal Cultic Performance and its Biblical Correspondence
Ada Taggar-Cohen
The present article explores the way the law in Hittite royal view, regarded as a prerogative of the king-while based on the "customs of the land"-was formulized through "royal decrees." By this formulization, the king enacted "royal legal sacrifice" under the adjudication of the royal court. Hittite royal rituals were enacted using written texts, which manifestly represent "narrativized ritual." Hittite festivals and rituals evolved over the years from local traditions involving specific gods through centralized royal legalization into a demanding calendar of festivals for different gods. In the final part of this article I suggest that Hittite material may help us perceive how biblical rituals have been narrativized in the Priestly texts.
Recent developments in Anatolian studies modify our understanding of one of the earliest stories said to have taken place in Anatolia: the šar tamḫari narrative, or “King of Battle.” On the one hand, archaeological evidence is accumulating to provide a plausible context for events like those described in the text. On the other, incorporation of the social significance of local cultural logics of time and history allow us to think of the narrative in a new light: less as a historical puzzle to be solved in a positivistic sense, and more as a window into the practice of reshaping and compressing past events into newly valuable narratives. More productive than “protohistory” and related terms is a recognition that instead of linear historical transformations marked by events like the adoption of writing, we should be concerned with different modes of history marked by heterogeneous approaches to past events.
Narration constitutes a potential anthropological constant comprehensible in different cultures and societies, modern and ancient. Narratives, both visual and textual, appear to have been used to create and legitimize royal authority and identity. Approaching this specific issue in respect of the Ancient Near East and aiming for an inclusive definition of narrative, we preliminarily suggest the following broad definition proposed by the linguists Garcia Landa and Onega Jaén: ‘A narrative is the semiotic representation of a series of events meaningfully connected in a temporal and causal way. …. Narratives can therefore be constructed using an ample variety of semiotic media: written or spoken language, visual images, gestures and acting, as well as combination of these.’ (Garcia Landa – Onega Jaén 1996, 2). In this respect, narratives focus on a story line implying ‘significant transformations’ with substantial meaning for both the audience and the characters of the tale in question. Corresponding to this definition and these assumptions, narratives may take the form of both texts and images. These media find constant application in the strategical legitimation of Ancient Near Eastern kingship. Thus, the workshop aims to determine which narrative topoi have once been selected to legitimize kingship, which media have been chosen to transmit these narratives, and what kind of narrative strategies have been applied. To consider both, texts and images, in the same margin, the workshop is based on a dual approach: referring to certain narrative themes both philological and archaeological material will be presented. Those topoi selected by the organizers allow a consistent approach and a mutual discussion of legitimizing narration. Every session – apart from the first one which includes a short opening paper – consists of two talks engaging an either philological or archaeological/iconographical approach as well as a respondent paper discussing their approaches, methods and the potential amount of new information we can acquire via this approach. The workshop ends in an open discussion of all issues tangled throughout the three preceding panels.
Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond
This volume represents a collection of contributions presented during the Third Annual University of Chicago Oriental Institute Seminar “Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond,” held at the Oriental Institute, February 23–24, 2007. The purpose of this conference was to examine more closely concepts of kingship in various regions of the world and in different time periods. The study of kingship goes back to the roots of fields such as anthropology and religious studies, as well as Assyriology and Near Eastern archaeology. More recently, several conferences have been held on kingship, drawing on cross-cultural comparisons. Yet the question of the divinity of the king—the king as god—has never before been examined within the framework of a cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary conference. Some of the recent anthropological literature on kingship relegates this question of kings who deified themselves to the background or voices serious misgivings about the usefulness of the distinction between “divine” and “sacred” kings. Several contributors to this volume have pointed out the Western, Judeo-Christian background of our categories of the human and the divine. However, rather than abandoning the term “divine kingship” because of its loaded history it is more productive to examine the concept of divine kingship more closely from a new perspective in order to modify our understanding of this term and the phenomena associated with it.