The divine foundations of kingship

The Neolithic revolution produced a religiosity centred on fertility issues and animal and vegetal reproduction. The Urban Revolution produced a polytheistic pantheon with deities supervising various aspects of urban life. Therefore, the rise and development of states also necessitated a solid ideological justification of power. In this regard, the earliest religious texts reveal the fundamental characteristics and structure of a fully developed Mesopotamian religion, supported by a complex set of rituals and myths. The texts of the Early Dynastic period already provide a complex picture of Mesopotamian religion. Moreover, many elements found in later texts originated in this period, when Mesopotamian culture acquired those aspects that would characterise it for the following three millennia. Lists of gods, descriptions of temples and hymns reveal the religious heritage of the Sumerian city-states. The historical and religious aspects of Sumerian culture will not be considered here. We will only consider those elements that are important for the understanding of the political and socio-economic phenomena of the time.

It has already been noted how the city-god played a fundamental role in the ideological justification of kingship, ensuring consensus and the collaboration of the population. Moreover, the divine sphere served as a means to explain the world in cultic and mythical terms. This cultic explanation was linked to the system of offerings (food, but also luxury goods). These were provided to the temples on a daily basis, or during festivals and other special occasions. The inequality of the redistributive system was therefore expressed in its fullest form and justified through the system of temple offerings. Redistribution was now too unbalanced to be a mere centralisation of reciprocal relations (such as the exchange of gifts and services). Therefore, it was conceptualised as an investment of present commodities for a future return (which is also the main aim of offerings and sacrifices to the gods). The community, believing that it was supporting the gods to its own advantage, then applied the same ideology to support the ruling elite.

Equally important was the mythical explanation of the world in its current form. The origins of each physical and cultural trait of one’s environment were attributed to the intervention of the divine or a hero in a more or less distant past. Similarly, the overall structure of the world was attributed to a creation god acting in a mythical past. Within this view, specific deities created more concrete aspects of daily life, eventually becoming the patrons of that particular sector. Consequently, there were gods protecting animals, cereals, writing and so on. There were also semi-divine characters, mostly idealised as ancient rulers. These figures created the main socio-political aspects of communal life, brought innovative technologies, or simply revolutionised the urban landscape. In this regard, the ruling king was able to provide his own contribution (building a temple or introducing a new festival), thus adding his name to the long and prestigious list of gods or kings who created something important for the community.

The boundary between the contribution of gods and heroes remains an unclear issue. One would expect that, while gods created aspects of life connected with nature, heroes brought more human innovations, mostly related to social institutions. However, it may be worth reconsidering the difference between nature and culture, in order to understand that the separation between gods and heroes was voluntarily blurred. In fact, the mythical foundations of kingship and power inevitably needed the support of the divine sphere. In this regard, certain deities (from Dumuzi to Gilgamesh), who were included in the Sumerian King List, are still considered by some as having a human and historical origin.

Naturally, all foundation myths were subject to a process of reinterpretation and revision for each period, thus reflecting historical and political changes. Therefore, the problems tackled by myths are problems that can be dated, though not with precision. Not all foundation myths were created in the Early Dynastic period, since some of them were developed to provide a background to later situations. Consequently, the issue of the immortality of the king, which is at the heart of the Epic of Gilgamesh, can be contextualised in the deification of the king (whose presumed immortality was disproved by his mortality, and therefore required an explanation), a practice that only appeared in the dynasty of Akkad. On the contrary, a myth such as the one of Adapa, despite having survived only in later texts, could have been a very ancient foundation myth. In fact, it is centred on an ancient problem, namely, that of reassuring the population that priests did not eat the food offered to the god, and were not gods themselves (despite living in the god’s house).

The current belief that the heroes of the foundation myths were all created in the Early Dynastic period is therefore inaccurate. Only at the beginning of the second millennium bc, Mesopotamian scholars decided to place these heroes in the dynastic sequences of Uruk and Kish. However, this contextualisation is not historically accurate: it only shows how these mythical kings were placed before kings that were actually attested in the written evidence. The latter is first found (in the form of royal inscriptions and dated archives) at the beginning of the Early Dynastic period Illa (or at the end of the Early Dynastic II). Consequently, a source such as the Sumerian King List logically placed the mythical kings in the Early Dynastic II period and the flood myth in the Early Dynastic I.

Despite their foundational purpose and their relevance to the problems of their respective contexts, these myths can still inform us on the earliest developments of Mesopotamian society. Since they are attested in later versions, they obviously reveal more (and more reliable details) on these later periods. For instance, the problem of the relations between farmers and shepherds (attested in the myth of Lahar and Ashnan), and of the provision of raw materials from distant lands (attested in the myth of Enmerkar and the lord of Aratta, and of Gilgamesh and Huwawa) were constant issues in Mesopotamian history. However, the presence of certain geographic and technological details indicates that they could have been developed in the Early Dynastic period, and later re-elaborated in their traditional Neo-Sumerian versions.