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Comparing Kingship in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia Cosmos, Politics and Landscape jane a. hill, philip jones, antonio j. morales If we refer to kingship as a political institution, we assume a point of view which would have been incomprehensible to the ancients . . . Whatever was significant was imbedded in the life of the cosmos, and it was precisely the king’s function to maintain the harmony of that integration. — Frankfort 1948:3 Introduction It is now more than sixty years since Henri Frankfort introduced his classic comparative study of rulership in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, Kingship and the Gods, with this basic distinction between the political and cosmic roles of kingship. This volume follows in Frankfort’s footsteps in examining the relationship of kingship, cosmos, and politics in the context of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization. Three millennia of recorded history and social traditions make ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia rich sources for a comparative study of the long-term political and social development of these two “pristine” cultures (for the most recent large-scale comparison, see Baines and Yoffee 1998). They were geographically near, while culturally quite distinct . For almost three thousand years, Egypt and Mesopotamia shared the concept of ultimate legitimate authority being invested in the single sacred 4 Jane A. Hill, Philip Jones, & Antonio J. Morales office of kingship. This office was legitimized by the gods, demonstrated through ritual, and reinforced by tradition. Through this sacred office the ruler exercised the essential political authority of the state. Both ancient civilizations provide us a rich material record of royal monuments (civil and religious ), iconography, and texts that eloquently define and frame the actions of the ruler: the context of his deeds, the purpose of his commissions, and the accomplishments achieved under his reign. As Frankfort implies, however, the sacred aspects of kingship in both societies drive a wedge between the ancient evidence and modern attempts to understand it. Was it “the king’s function to maintain the harmony of [the] integration” of human life with the cosmos, as Frankfort argued, or was it, as we would expect of our own rulers, to facilitate the integration of his human subjects with his own regime or with each other? In taking up this challenge, we join a debate that stretches back beyond him to, at least, the late 19th century (Feeley-Harnik 1985). In very broad outline, this debate has inspired three basic approaches to understanding the dichotomy: (i) privileging one of the cosmic and political orientations of kingship over the other; (ii) treating the two as separate but equal facets of kingship; and (iii) exploring the interaction between the two of them. The first such approach attempts a definite answer to our question posed above. Beginning with the classic work of Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1894; see also, Frazer 1900; 1905–1915; and 1922), there has been an on-going controversy in anthropology and history as to whether kingship in pre-modern societies should be considered fundamentally either cosmic or political. This debate has often spilled over, more or less overtly, into the study of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian kingship. Frazer postulated that kings had originally embodied the powers of nature and must therefore be sacrificed before their own physical decline affected the fertility of the world around. Much of this reconstruction seemed congruent with either extant Greco-Roman memories of Egypt and Mesopotamia or the material revealed with gathering pace throughout the 19th century by archaeology. Particularly with regard to the Egyptian evidence, prominent festivals such as the Heb-Sed seem to evoke Frazer’s basic principle (Uphill 1965), while the figure of Osiris, known already to Frazer from Classical sources and utilized by him, seemed to be an archetypal “Dying and Rising” god (Otto 1968:24; Griffiths 1980). Mesopotamia fit Frazer’s theories less obviously, but after the First World War, the so-called Myth and Introduction 5 Ritual school of scholars sought to apply a version of Frazer’s ideas about cosmic kingship to both Egyptian and Mesopotamian rulers (Fairman 1955; Gadd 1933; Hooke 1933). Frankfort’s Kingship and the Gods was a rejoinder to the Myth and Ritual school, although it is noteworthy that he judged Egyptian kingship to be significantly more cosmic in orientation than its Mesopotamian equivalent (Wengrow 1999). In general, Frankfort’s views were congruent with those espoused by Assyriologists and his work elicited little controversy with respect to Mesopotamia. Traditionally, Assyriologists have tended to treat cosmic aspects of kingship as a...

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