Tales of Royalty: Notions of Kingship in Visual and Textual Narration in the Ancient Near East ed. by Elisabeth Wagner-Durand and Julia Linke (review)

Tales of Royalty: Notions of Kingship in Visual and Textual Narration in the Ancient Near East derives from a workshop at the Sixty-First Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, in Bern and Geneva in 2015 (with some additional contributions not presented there). Proceedings from RAI workshops have an advantage over many other collected studies volumes because they are not haphazardly assembled but carefully constructed around certain themes, and we see that here. The editors focus on two things—narrative/narratology and ancient Near Eastern royal legitimation—and they particularly want to tie the two together. The volume is organized around the royal "topoi of 'the builder,' 'the wise man,' and 'the successful fighter' … because they are formulas of royal legitimation … that materialize in narrative media" (p. 280). While reading, though, I found myself often reading about either one topic or the other—there were numerous definitions of "narrative" provided among the essays and discussion of the subject, and several treatments of legitimation, but it was not always obvious how the two intersected. I write this not to diminish any of the contributions or the volume as a whole, but to encourage the editors to continue their pursuits and provide further illumination. A secondary concern of the editors is to draw more attention to visual media as presenting narratives, a phenomenon often ignored (even in this volume texts receive more attention). As Wagner-Durand notes in her final essay, "the workshop in Bern has (painfully) shown that visual and other material forms of narration are still not commonly accepted in our fields" (p. 269).

In "Bound by Stories?! Narration as a Strategy of Royal Legitimation: An Introduction," the volume editors provide a preface to the volume. They explain their interest in narration and legitimacy, outline the dual (visual and textual) media they cover, and provide abstracts of the articles in the book.

Elisabeth Wagner-Durand follows this with "'Pious Shepherd' and 'Guardian of Truth': In Search of the Narrative Visualization of the Kings' Piety and Righteousness," in which she searches for visual narratives illustrating the ruler's piety in Mesopotamian iconography. Guiding the reader on a tour from the fourth millennium to the first b.c.e., Wagner-Durand concludes that many pieces often regarded as visual narratives, such as the Uruk Vase, are more aptly described as "normative description[s] of reality" (p. 29)—and because such royal qualities as wisdom and righteousness were deemed omnipresent, "it is hardly astonishing that those qualities were bound in non-narrative images" (p. 41). In "The Literate King Reconsidered: Self-representation, Wisdom, and Learnedness," Nicole Brisch explores the four main examples of Mesopotamian kings (Šulgi of Ur, Lipit-Eštar of Isin, Ashurbanipal, and Nabonidus) who drew attention to their literacy in inscriptions. She moves the discussion from the "ultimately irrelevant" question of authenticity of these claims to the "more interesting" (p. 58) question of why they were included, offering some speculative reasons but acknowledging that we cannot know with certainty. Frauke Weiershäuser provides a brief reaction to the previous two works in "Response: Das Narrativ vom guten König" (pp. 65–73). Responding to Brisch, she concurs that, while wisdom was indeed a primary characteristic of a king's self-representation and an indicator of his special proximity to the gods, literacy was not a prerequisite for wisdom. She also observes that the king was never represented artistically in the role of a scribe. Responding to Wagner-Durand, Weiershäuser questions whether having background knowledge would affect our understanding of whether narratives are depicted visually, using the example of medieval art depicting biblical scenes that do not show a sequence of action but do present part of a story to the knowing viewer.

The volume's focus shifts to royal building activities with Julia Linke's "Building, Arts, and Politics...