In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 “I Am the Sun of Babylon”: Solar Aspects of Royal Power in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia dominique charpin1 In Mesopotamia, manifestations of light play a crucial role in the formulation of feelings. The face of one who is angry is “dark”;2 in contrast, one who is satisfied “radiates,” sometimes occurring with the additional complement “as the sun.” And so a woman who receives good news from the brother she thought dead states: “I rejoiced greatly so: ‘Addiya is not dead, Addiya is living!’ and I shined like the sun.”3 Another example can be found in a letter whose sender expects the king to visit the troops before he leads the expedition: “When my lord will stand in the assembly of his servants and his servants will see him, the heart of the soldiers will live. And when my lord will reach his goal with his troops, then the heart of his troops will shine like the sun.”4 In all those cases, we are dealing with metaphors.5 On the other hand, the prologue of the famous Code of Ḫammurapi shows that the king identifies himself with the Sun-god. After enumerating the main cities of his kingdom, the king declares: “I am the Sun of the city of Babylon , who spreads light over the lands of Sumer and Akkad.”6 The sentence is unambiguous: Babylon is in the center of Ḫammurapi’s kingdom, and from his capital he shines over all his territories. This feature is not an innovation of the Amorite period. Already at the end of the 3rd millennium, Shulgi proclaimed himself “Sun of his land,” or “faithful god, sun of his land” (Seux 1967:46; s.v. dutu). In the same way, Shu-ilishu of Isin described himself as the “Sun of Sumer.” Such a conception of kingship, that is identifying the king with the Sun-god, influenced Babylonia as much as Assyria. Kurigalzu is de- 66 Dominique Charpin scribed as “a judge who investigates matters” (Seux 1967:66; s.v. dayyānu). We also find the epithet “Sun of his land” in an inscription of Nebuchadnezzar I and the set phrase “Sun of all the human beings” in inscriptions of several Assyrian kings from Tukulti-Ninurta I onwards (references in Seux 1967:284). Nebuchadnezzar II is also described as “the one who like Shamash watches over every land” (Seux 1967:52; s.v. barû). When one considers the theme of the Sun-king, the period of El-Amarna immediately springs to mind, indeed for the Hittites the Sun also played a crucial role with sovereigns referring to themselves as “My sun.” In this chapter, I shall not deal with the examples of Hittite kings nor Egyptian kings, which would, of course, require a lengthy comparison with Mesopotamian ideology. The present contribution offers an interpretation of this solar image of the king, primarily during the Old Babylonian period. What I was not fully aware of at the beginning, but which is clear to me now through treating this theme in the context of this conference, “Experiencing Power—Generating Authority: Cosmos and Politics in the Ideology of Kingship in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia,” is that the subject certainly has some connection with my own identity as, for the French, ever since the reign of Louis XIV kingship is immediately connected to the sun. The King and the God Shamash Shamash and Justice In the Mesopotamian pantheon, each god was the patron of a special aspect of the universe: Gula was the mistress of health, Adad settled the rains, and so on. These aspects can be found in two different areas: in the prayers addressed to the gods, but also and perhaps even more in the curses that invoke them. The god Shamash is attested as a god of justice since the 3rd millennium.7 The reason for such an association is explicitly given in the famous “Shamash Hymn.”8 Because the sun travels across the earth during the day, he sees all that is happening, even what is hidden from the eyes of men (Reiner 1985:72, line 58): “You are the one who brings light to the case of the evil and the criminal.” We also find that the rays of the sun are similar to a net that capture the evildoer: “Your brilliance overwhelms the earth like a net.”9 This explains why some oaths were sworn ina saparrim, literally “through/with a net.” Solar Aspects of Royal Power in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia...

Share