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3 Rising Suns and Falling Stars: Assyrian Kings and the Cosmos eckart frahm1 In Book VI of his City of God, St. Augustine discusses, and eventually dismisses , an attempt by the famous Roman polymath Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) to classify various approaches to the divine (Dihle 1996). Drawing on concepts developed by the Stoic philosopher Panaetius, Varro distinguished between three dimensions of divinity: a cosmological dimension (theologia naturalis), a mythological dimension (theologia fabularis), and a political one (theologia civilis). As cosmic entities, gods represented elements of nature; in mythology, they appeared as protagonists of stories in which they interacted with other deities; and in their “political” capacity, they were associated with specific cities or countries and worshipped in local temples dedicated to them. Varro associated each of his three dimensions with specific professional groups. Philosophers, he argued, would focus on the cosmological , poets on the mythological, and priests and rulers on the political aspects of the divine world. Even though derived from an analysis of the Greco-Roman pantheon, Varro’s theory of a “theologia tripertita” can also serve as a useful investigative tool when one aims at a better comprehension of the theological concepts of other civilizations. Jan Assmann has applied it to the religion of ancient Egypt (Assmann 1991:16–18), and with similar justification, one can try to employ it when studying the deities of ancient Mesopotamia. The Babylonian god Marduk provides a good example. His divine statue, placed in the cella of the Esagil temple in Babylon, represents his political dimension, the planet Jupiter, closely associated with him, represents 98 Eckart Frahm his cosmological qualities, and Enūma Eliš, the Babylonian Epic of Creation (Foster 2005:436–86) that describes how Marduk fought primeval monsters and created the world, provides the mythological context for his rise to prominence and power. It is true that many Egyptian and ancient Near Eastern deities possessed only one or two of Varro’s three dimensions. This applies especially to minor deities, but a few major gods were likewise deficient in this respect. Pharaoh Akhenaten, for instance, when implementing his new brand of solar religion during the Amarna period, propagated a deity, the Aten, that had an all-powerful cosmological presence but no political or mythological dimensions (Assmann 1991:243–53). In Assyria the god Ashur remained essentially limited, for many centuries, to the “political” quality of a god closely linked with his city, Assur, and the land of Assyria, both of which bore his name. Attempts to identify him with the god Enlil—and later with Marduk—in order to provide him with mythological and cosmological facets, never fully succeeded (Frahm 1997:282–88; Vera Chamaza 2002:71– 167). Yet Ashur and the Aten were rather exceptional deities. The rule for the most powerful gods and goddesses of the ancient Near East was that they had some share in all the three dimensions outlined by Varro. It has been frequently observed, most prominently by Henri Frankfort (1948), that in the ancient Near East, ideas about the gods were closely connected to the ideology of kingship. In accordance with the dialectics of “political theology” (Assmann 2002:15–27), Mesopotamian and Egyptian rulers would model their own image on that of the gods, while at the same time representations of the gods were to a significant extent projections onto the divine world of the political self-representation of those very rulers. Hence it is not surprising to rediscover traces of Varro’s three dimensions in the sphere of earthly government. This is most obvious with regard to the political dimension, which Varro, after all, had derived from the sphere of human power. The palaces from which Mesopotamian kings ruled their states were, despite a few conspicuous differences, in many ways the functional equivalents of the temples, and shared with them a number of architectural features. For instance , 1st millennium throne rooms, where subjects and foreign dignitaries would officially encounter the king, were designed very much like temple cellas, where worshippers would pray to the deity (Oppenheim 1977:327f.). Furthermore, as I will discuss further below, certain royal rituals are highly Rising Suns and Falling Stars: Assyrian Kings and the Cosmos 99 reminiscent of rituals carried out before the gods. There is also evidence for what one might dub the “mythology” of political leaders. It finds its most obvious expression in the “autobiographical ” inscriptions Mesopotamian kings left on lasting supports such as stone slabs, stelae, rock reliefs, or baked clay tablets...

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