Invented History, Fabricated Power: The Narrative Shaping of Civilization and Culture

By Barry Wood

Invented History, Fabricated Power begins with an examination of prehistoric beliefs (in spirits, souls, mana, orenda) that provided personal explanation and power through ritual and shamanism among tribal peoples. On this foundation, spiritual power evolved into various kinds of divine sanction for kings and emperors (Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Indian, Chinese and Japanese). As kingships expanded into empires, fictional histories and millennia-long genealogies developed that portrayed imperial superiority and greatness. Supernatural events and miracles were attached to religious founders (Hebrew, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Islamic). A unique variation developed in the Roman Church which fabricated papal power through forgeries in the first millennium CE and the later “doctrine of discovery” which authorized European domination and conquest around the world during the Age of Exploration. Elaborate fabrications continued with epic histories and literary cycles from the Persians, Ethiopians, Franks, British, Portuguese, and Iroquois Indians. Both Marxists and Nazis created doctrinal texts which passed for economic or political explanations but were in fact self-aggrandizing narratives that eventually collapsed. The book ends with the idealistic goals of the current liberal democratic way of life, pointing to its limitations as a sustaining narrative, along with numerous problems threatening its viability over the long term. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785274770

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Invented History, Fabricated Power

ALSO BY BARRY WOOD

Malcolm Lowry: The Writer and His Critics

The Only Freedom

The Magnificent Frolic

Invented History, Fabricated Power

The Narrative Shaping of Civilization and Culture

Barry Wood

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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Copyright © Barry Wood 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940782

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-475-6 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-475-9 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

For

Colin Wood

and

Michael Wood

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

About the Cover

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Prologue: The Prehistory of Power: Souls Spirits, Deities

Part One Kings and Emperors

1Divine Kingship in Mesopotamia

2Pharaohs among the Indestructibles

3Kingship among the Hebrews

4The Deification of Roman Emperors

5The Deva-Rajas in India and Southeast Asia

6The Chinese Mandate from Heaven

7The Japanese Imperial Cult

Part Two Empires before the Common Era

8The Legendary Empire of the Sumerians

9Legendary Empires of Preclassical Greece

10Patriarchs, Exodus, and the Epic of Israel

11Legendary Empires of Ancient India

12The Legendary Founding of Rome

Part Three Founders

13Moses: The Israelite Lawgiver

14Buddha and Legends of Previous Buddhas

15The Savior Narratives

16Muhammad, the Qur’an, and Islam

17The Virgin Mary through the Centuries

18Tonantzin and Our Lady of Guadalupe

Part Four Empires of the Common Era

19Narrative Inventions of the Holy Roman Empire

20The Epic of Kings, Alexander the Great, and the Malacca Sultinate

21The Franks, Charlemagne, and the Chansons de Geste

22The Legendary Kingdom of King Arthur

23Ethiopian Kings and the Ark of the Covenant

24Narratives of the Virgin Queen

Part Five Ideologies

25Discovery: The European Narrative of Power

26Epics of the Portuguese Seaborne Empire

27Dekanawida and the Iroquois League

28The New England Canaan of the Puritans

29The Marxist Classless Society

30Adolph Hitler: Narratives of Aryans and Jews

Epilogue: A Clash of Narratives

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are all a synthesis of many teachers but a few stand out as inescapable influences. As an undergraduate I had the pleasure of studying under Northrop Frye at the University of Toronto, one of the great scholars of our time who subsequently became a personal friend and occasional correspondent. His anatomical structuring of literature established a unique ideal: one may examine one literary work after another, which is what we do at the beginning of literary study, but there are patterns that emerge as we explore across whole genres and cultures from the library of global literature. Frye’s compelling image suggests that literature, history, and culture may be imagined synchronically as spread out across an interactive conceptual space. As his many books demonstrate, literature provides words of power that animate history, culture, and civilization. Second to Frye was his talented student, the Canadian poet Jay McPherson. Half a century after I took her courses, she agreed to read an earlier version of this book. Months later I received the carefully edited manuscript from her niece. Jay had worked on it right up until she passed away, leaving it for her niece to return. Thanks are due to Emeritus Professor Roberta Weldon who pointed to three sections of this earlier effort and said this was where she thought my best argument lay. A decade later, this book is the result.

Several chapters of this work are based on research conducted and resources collected in Southeast Asia. I would like to thank the University of Houston, the Texas International Education Consortium (TIEC), and the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo in conjunction with Institut Teknologi Mara (ITM) for a four-year teaching residency in Malaysia (1987–1991) that led to opportunities, discoveries, and resources not available in the United States. This included exploration of monuments, temples, and ruins from several ancient cultures. Librarians at the University of Malaya, National University of Singapore, and Gadja Mada University, Indonesia, were invariably helpful. I would like to thank the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS), University of Houston, for a Book Completion Grant supporting publication; anonymous readers who provided useful suggestions; and my editor Megan Greiving at Anthem for guiding this book through the passages and hallways of academic publication. Finally, my wife Vickie is deserving of heartfelt praise for encouraging and supporting this project at every step of the way.

ABOUT THE COVER

Victory Stele c. 2230 BCE: Naram Sin, the most well-known divine king of the Sumerians, climbs toward the sky stepping on fallen warriors as he approaches Shamash, the Sun god. Location: The Louvre. Dima Moroz / Shutterstock.com

The Trojan Horse: According to Homer and Virgil, the wooden horse left behind by the Greeks was hauled into the city by the Trojans. At night, Greek warriors hidden inside emerged to burn Troy and win the ten-year war. Mati Nitibhon / Shutterstock.com

Our Lady of Guadalupe: According to legend, the Virgin Mary appeared to Juan Diego on the sacred hill of the Aztec fertility goddess. Her miracle of the flowers persuaded the Catholic priest to build a church at this site. EmanArt92 / Shutterstock.com

The Sword in the Stone: The Sword in the Stone was impossible to remove until the legendary Arthur performed the miracle and thus established his right to become the king of England. Fer Gregory / Shutterstock.com

Meditating Buddha: The largest Buddhist stupa in the world, Borobudur, is located in Central Java. Seventy-two stone Buddhas on the upper platform sit within perforated bell-shaped stone stupas. The ninth-century builders left one Buddha exposed to view. R. M. Nunes / Shutterstock.com

Rama and Sita: This Balinese wood carving depicts King Rama and his queen, hero and heroine of the Indian Ramayana epic, which continues to animate Indian literature, art, dance, and drama across South and Southeast Asia. Dmitry Rukhlenko / Shutterstock.com

Moses and the Tablets: In the biblical Book of Exodus, Moses, leader of the Israelites, comes down from Mount Sinai with the stone tablets that Yahweh has engraved with the Ten Commandments. Artist: Gustave Dore. ruskpp / Shutterstock.com

Adolf Hitler: Chancellor of the Third Reich from 1933 until 1945, Hitler championed the superiority of the Aryan people that justified invasions all across Europe and the Final Solution: the death camps and the execution of six million Jews. FotograFFF / Shutterstock.com

ABBREVIATIONS

Quotations from works traditionally divided into books, scenes, chapters, verses, and lines are identified with the following abbreviations. Editions are identified in the reference list:

Introduction

We typically think of power as economic, military, or political. In this war-torn millennium, stealth aircraft and smart bombs come to mind. In past cultures, we think of invaders on horseback or sailing ships armed with cannons. We rarely think of power as an intangible invention of leaders, elites, artists, sculptors, or storytellers in imperial courts. But from the dawn of civilization, kings, empires, and societies have developed self-aggrandizing narratives in inscriptions, relief art, literary works, and political tracts. Fictional History, Fabricated Power traces narratives of power from prominent cultures across the globe. The continental divide of this study is the distinction between story and fact, the latter becoming the primary unit of knowledge with the rise of empirical science. The motivation was the need to establish a person, society, culture, or ideology as separate and superior through imaginative means. Before the Renaissance, meaning was stored and communicated through narrative, which Hayden White (1989, 1) described as a metacode understandable to all members of a culture. More broadly, Roland Barthes (1977, 79) described narrative as international, transhistorical, transcultural, a human universal according to Donald Brown (1991), defining it as a reservoir of primary importance for discovering how cultures worldwide throughout history invented themselves. The ubiquity of invented history defines this as a rich area for probing the social and psychological nature of power.

Effects of this approach are several; those relevant to this study are three. From the dawn of civilization, kings or their loyal elites created narratives of power as enhancements of their persons, positions, and authority. From any objective viewpoint, these defy historical verification; such narratives are almost entirely fictional. This is true not only with kings and lawgivers but also with spiritual leaders who stand as founders of major world religions. Second, entire populations have been receptive to such narratives and thus responded with almost uniform support for their leaders and dedication to their kingdoms and empires. This behavior is a fact of observation; quite apart from issues of historical fact, such narratives meet imaginative needs of populations so influenced. Third, entire populations have been empowered by elaborate narratives of imperial origins and back histories that justify nationalist and imperialist behavior—the subjugation of other cultures and, in some cases, persecution, inquisition, execution, ethnic cleansing, and wholesale destruction. Following from the fourfold increase in population since World War II resulting in increased conflict between regions, nations, power blocks, and radically different cultural narratives, we have entered a period of when social, political, and economic life and science have become tangled such that the necessary separation of fact from fiction is the major challenge of the twenty-first century.

The dynamic explored in this study is the ubiquitous internalization of narrative. Humans exhibit a capacity and need for cognitive blending in which they merge their own life stories with the ultimate concerns of their societies; they become inhabitants of cultural narratives. As this study argues, this habitation or domiciling of populations within a larger cultural narrative lies behind the work projects that raised the pyramid-tombs of Egyptian pharaohs or teams of sculptors who carved the spiral reliefs of Trajan’s Column in Rome. These monuments provided additional enhancements for rulers and elites and satisfy the needs of artisans who built them. Stoneworkers have been as industrious at sculpting narratives conferring cultural power as constructing fortifications and harbors.

Many of the greatest empires have developed elaborate founding narratives. The Sumerians, Hebrews, Romans, Franks, British, and Maurya kingdom of India developed fictional genealogies that make up a narrative back history, often with spatial and temporal inflation that archaeological studies reveal as fabrications. Such narratives provide a prescientific worldview that makes sense of existing social and political reality. Since the Renaissance, rulers and leaders have created enveloping narratives that their populations could inhabit. Puritan clerics solidified a view of New England colonists as God’s new Chosen People and the process of colonization as a battle against a Satanic conspiracy. This narrative served the psychological needs of migrants who had been abused by an authoritarian British monarchy and were now attempting to preserve their religious beliefs in an untamed wilderness. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx created a revolutionary narrative that castigated the emerging power of a capitalist elite and created an idealized vision of future equality that eventually engaged millions in Russia and China. In the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler fabricated narratives around Aryan superiority and Jewish corruption in a crowded nation abused by World War I reparations to mobilize thousands to carry out his final solution. We have recently witnessed the rise of new narratives of power among people who have suffered multiple injustices: the dramatic rebirth of an ancient caliphate, complete with a long-predicted apocalyptic battle that captured the attention of youth around the world who have sought to inhabit this narrative. Though the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL) may now (2020) be nearing collapse, its narrative power that captivated thousands in the new millennium reveals the ongoing influence of invented history in fabricating power. These and others throughout history reveal that narrative fictions have been one of the most effective, though unrecognized, instruments of power across the whole span of human civilization. This analysis of power provides a unique perspective on global history over the past several thousand years.

This approach to narrative as the vehicle of power requires some clarification. As a specialized subject of inquiry, narrative has traditionally fallen within the domain of literary studies. More precisely, the root meaning of literature as writing formed with letters has constrained the study of narrative almost exclusively to written works. This soft approach, which undergirds the Modern Language Association, thousands of literary academics, and university courses in literature, has treated the human imagination as an endlessly creative faculty generating poetry, plays, stories, and novels. A broadened perspective suggests that narrative is a fundamental cognitive endowment by which humans place all experience within a meaningful framework of time, space, and causality. As Barbara Hardy remarks, We dream in narrative, day-dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative (1968, 5). As a look at scholarly literature soon reveals, narrative studies have begun to inform several other disciplines: anthropology (Marshack), education (Montessori), cognitive science (Herman; Turner), evolutionary studies (Boyd; Chaisson), and cosmic history (Christian; Alvarez).

Recognizing this deeply embedded endowment of the human mind helps us to understand why narrative has been used repeatedly to invent, enhance, and enforce power. Long before humans developed reasoning skills, logical thought, moral judgment, and computational skills, their minds and behavior were most easily accessed, educated, shaped, stimulated, and motivated through narrative. This study explores how this has been accomplished from the time when recorded stories first appeared; it also attempts to stimulate thinking about our own personal, societal, cultural, political, and economic narratives to promote a more objective assessment of human behavior.

Narrative, however, sometimes leads to dubious conceptual conclusions. Today we recognize false causality as one of the most common errors in logic. The human mind seeks connection, tending to see present events as caused by earlier events. Literature employs this with the plot device of foreshadowing. In real life, many present events do have past causes, but we often tend to stretch the principle so that past events are seen as prophecy or prediction. The reverse process of creating a past that explains the present leads to the invented narratives of power that populate cultures in this study. In earlier times, a past created through narrative was the accepted substitute for a history that was not yet known and thus did not exist. Meanwhile, an authentic application of science consists of the construction of astronomical, geological, biological, and anthropological narratives of the past to explain the present.

This study exposes several conundrums. One is the tendency of early peoples to accept narratives with no empirical or historical foundation as factually and historically true. Most narratives of power rest on precisely this confusion, and those who create them succeed because of the human inability to discriminate regularly, accurately, and precisely between narratives that represent situations in the real world and narratives that appear to do so but are, in fact, products of imagination. The fact is, however, that this inability persists, lying behind pseudoscience, beliefs in paranormal events, questionable medical procedures, and conspiracy theories.

The narratives explored in this study are of many different kinds. As we look at cultural narratives from the Ethiopians, Greeks, Japanese, Puritans, Romans, or Sumerians, we conclude that they are partly fictional, nearly fictional, or so remotely related to real events that they are almost entirely fictional. Reading parallel narratives across cultures refines our ability to distinguish real from fictional; this was a lesson first taught by Sir James Fraser a century ago in The Golden Bough (1890), a cross-cultural collection of parallel myths. Because of the popular meaning the word has acquired, myths are too easily dismissed as ancient fanciful stories or downright lies, and Fraser’s lesson has been lost. This is one reason we have adopted the term narrative: it has not yet acquired the taint of automatic dismissal; moreover, narrative casts a wider net that includes the subtext of otherwise serious societal analyses such as Marxism and Nazism that are not quite mythical though they rest on a powerful narrative foundation.

An examination of narratives from kingships, empires, and societies widely separated in time and space illustrates the relativity of such narratives and especially their fictional aspects: superhuman heroes, divine powers, massive inflation of facts, gigantism, fabricated origins, and impossible genealogies. When we encounter these in other cultures, we usually recognized them as fictions and architectural monuments to these as valueless. Ancient peoples accepted their own narratives but rejected those of other cultures. This is why Babylonians so easily tore down Israelite temples, Christians destroyed Greek temples at Olympia, Hindus leveled a Muslim mosque at the alleged birthplace of King Rama, and the conquistadors destroyed most of the religious iconography of the Aztecs in Mexico. People have universally recognized the narratives of other cultures as fictional while remaining oblivious to their own cultural fabrications that are believed sufficiently enough to assure power and authority for the leaders of the regime. It is a rare Cicero or Voltaire who is capable of making the distinction and brave enough to publish it.

This study unfolds in five parts. The first follows the earliest phase of societal organization associated with kingship, which emerged with the first substantial cities in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Palestine, India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. Kingship narratives of power have variously identified kings as gods come down to Earth, divine representatives of the gods on Earth, or as deva-rajas (god-kings). In some cases, they have been seen as humans destined to become gods upon death. The efficacy of such narratives of kingship authority and power, aided by loyal elites, to control huge numbers of people is evident in the monumental architecture of early civilizations: palaces, temples, ziggurats, city fortifications, and astonishing structures such as the Egyptian pyramids, the Great Wall of China, and Monks Mound at Cahokia, all constructed by populations motivated by prevailing cultural narratives.

A subsequent phase of civilization occurs when cities gain control over nearby cities, adjacent territories, and diverse populations to become empires. An entirely new kind of narrative appears, generally taking the form of ancient imperial origins, often linked to semi-divine ancestors and supernatural events, sometimes fortified with extended genealogies that trace to admired civilizations of the distant past. Such narratives of empire include chronological inflation with an extended, even vast, prehistory; spatial inflation of cities, palaces, and temples; and numerical inflation in the size of imperial armies, victories, captives, and victims of wars.

A third kind of narrative has accumulated around founders of religion and early law codes. In all cases founder narratives have been understood within their own cultures as believable biographies, though all were composed decades or even centuries after the life they appear to document. Additionally, none of them are corroborated by independent evidence. The results are nearly impenetrable layers of myth, legend, miracle, and supernaturalism that make it impossible to discern reality within the fiction. Quests for historical founders in both Christianity and Islam have illuminated this overlay of myth and legend that has accumulated around all major religious leaders. Within the limits of this study, similar quests are summarized for several more religious and legal founders. These expose a particular issue with narrative: a conviction that a historically accurate and biographically factual narrative necessarily leads to a misapprehension of myth and legend such that prophesy, miracle, and supernaturalism are effectively pulled along as outliers of the narrative itself. Various levels of cognitive myopia are evident here. Within a familiar culture, myth, miracle, and legend may be misapprehended as biographically and historically true, but such toleration is rarely extended to other religious or ideological traditions, which are likely to be dismissed precisely because of those qualities of narrative that are clearly fictional. The acceptance of a supernatural birth in Christianity, for instance, does not predispose believers to accept such a supernatural event in Hinduism or Buddhism or the conflation of rulers and gods in the imperial narratives of China and Japan.

A fourth cluster includes narratives of imperial power in the Common Era, beginning with the Roman Empire. With the fascination and intrigue of classical civilization exerting one influence, the developing church another, and the imperial template established by Roman historians and poets a third, we find literary or historical fictions of a legendary past developing later among the Franks, British, Portuguese, and Ethiopians. In all cases, a more recent culture has acquired an ancient legacy, sometimes biblical, more often from the Royal House of Troy. Running parallel with these, the so-called Holy Roman Empire became and remained the supreme power in Europe until well after the Renaissance. Its authority was long thought to be thoroughly grounded in historical events, but in fact its power was underpinned by invented documents we now recognize as fabricated narratives believed at the time to be factual that conferred enormous power on the Church hierarchy until they were exposed as ingenious fabrications and forgeries. Alongside these forged fictions, we find epic adventures depicting origins of Persian, French, British, and Ethiopian cultures.

A fifth variety focuses on societies motivated by idealized visions of a perfected civilization yet to be achieved. Europeans inspired by papal visions of world domination and Christianization fabricated a narrative in which their discovery of distant places took precedence over indigenous occupants. Some, like the New England Canaan of the American Puritans, were informed by biblical narrative enhanced with a zealous trust in their own divine election. The Marxist classless society and Adolf Hitler’s promulgation of the Aryan race as destined rulers of the world were based on specific constricted analyses of history. The Marxian analysis was responsibly academic, though at the hands of later thinkers it veered into polemics, revolution, and totalitarian rule. Nazi narratives of Aryans and Jews set forth some of the most severe and outrageous distortions of European history, motivated by an intent to conquer and dominate according to a self-serving ideological narrative. Populations within these cultures regarded them as factually grounded in historical reality and in fact launched programs to achieve them. Historical perspective allows us to see them as extremes of narrative fabrication.

My focus on narrative comprises the literary component of this study. The historical dimension is evident in the range of societies explored from remote corners of the world over more than four millennia. However, attempting to separate literary from historical is artificial, though somewhat habitual because of the departmentalized structure of an academy that upholds customary though fairly stringent boundaries between disciplines. This is a revealing metaphor: in the real world literature and history comprise a single nexus of cultural identity. What this study reveals is that ancient history is nearly always a narrative construction where imaginative stories eclipse history with invented narratives of power. Classical epics such as The Iliad, The Aeneid, and Torah provided a history for the Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews just as The Shahnameh, Ramayana, and Kebra Negast do for the Persians, Indians, and Ethiopians, respectively. Early works titled as histories, the first-century BCE History of Rome by Livy and the twelfth-century History of the Kings of England by Geoffrey of Monmouth, include genealogical histories that are almost entirely fictional.

Evidence from a third discipline runs through this study. Archaeological excavations of most ancient civilizations allow us to test ancient claims against the archaeological record. Surprisingly, despite the disparities, few such comparisons have been made and where they have been they are often superficial. Despite claims of historicity, superficial judgment abounds: geographically existing places mentioned in an ancient historical work do not define the work as factually true any more than an accurate and meteorologically correct account of the fall of Atlanta during the Civil War in Gone with the Wind proves it is a true story. Archaeological investigation has revealed that many ancient kingdoms, especially in Israel and India, were literary creations unsupported by evidence on the ground. Ancient representations of political power connected to kingship and empire open a window on the narrative inflation of the historical past. The expanded dimensions of palaces, temples, and cities measured against the meagre or missing remains provide a revealing perspective on ancient narratives of power. In some cases, the absolute lack of archaeological evidence points to works considered to have a historical core as entirely literary fabrications.

The contribution of this study is in shedding light on an aspect of history that often escapes investigation. Historians rehearse historical and economic facts but often omit commentary on the beliefs of early cultures, thus tending to slide over their narrative foundations. Exceptions are rare but they stand out when noted. In discussing divine kingship among the Mesopotamians, Leo Oppenheim (1977, 98) remarks, "The special relationships which—according to royal propaganda—existed between the king and his god was said to materialize in the successes of the ruler in war and in the prosperity of the country in peace." This is one of a very few scholarly acknowledgements that legends surrounding kingship, empires, religious founders, and lawgivers are fabrications from within the culture in question. In discussing The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis), Raymond Davis (2010, xxiii) remarks, There is no point in deploring the mendacity of a compiler [in the fifth century CE] who was prepared to invent material to fill the lives before his time, a clear recognition that the first 25 percent of papal history is pious fiction. Commenting on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the English Kings, which includes an early account of King Arthur, Simon Schama (2000, 116) ventures to call it an outrageous fantasy. Writing about Marx’s Das Kapital, Mark G. Spencer (2013, xxiii) notes that it has been read as a Gothic novel, Victorian melodrama, or satirical utopia. These scattered insights can be applied to cultures worldwide from ancient to modern times.

In general, sorting out historical fact from mythic or legendary material is unlikely to achieve anything more than tentative results. The tendency has been to bypass it because of its obvious fabrication, but this misses the point. If we dismiss what we are here calling fabricated narratives of power because they seem to offer nothing sound, reliable, or empirical for the construction of history, we may bypass their imaginative power to motivate entire populations. In ancient times narrative was the only cognitive tool available for the construction of history.

The methodological goal of this study is to expose the imaginative dimension in the creation, assertion, and maintenance of power. This involves the revisioning of numerous cultural products, often at the risk of questioning and challenging long-held habits and beliefs. This approach is deemed valuable, indeed essential, as an important part of understanding the human situation through time, and especially as we move progressively away from dualism toward a scientifically grounded worldview. Inevitably, some sacred cows will fall, but this is a necessary step in cognitive liberation.

This may be an appropriate point for a suggestion to the reader. In an age of instant access to information from all periods of history, time is easily telescoped with a concomitant eclipsing of duration and time spans between events or between events and their literary retelling. We are easily surprised to learn that the young Prince Alexander (the Great), tutored by Aristotle who had schooled him in Homer’s Iliad, was so fascinated by the stories of the Trojan War that he took a detour to visit the site of Troy where he could find no trace of the city. Inattention to chronology is the culprit. The disappearance of Homer’s Troy comes into perspective once we realize that Alexander’s fourth-century visit occurred seven centuries after the fall of the city (1184 BCE), a time span equivalent to our separation from the age of Dante and Petrarch.

Recognizing such time spans between events, especially in ancient times, is germane to this study, particularly spans between revered lives or events and their later representation in writing, the latter being our only access to a past otherwise lost. Attention should be given to dates; chronological detail informs most parts this study.

PROLOGUE

THE PREHISTORY OF POWER: SOULS, SPIRITS, DEITIES

The earliest humans were, for many reasons, ill-equipped for survival. While living in trees our primate ancestors evolved a suite of physical attributes: superior climbing skills, binocular color vision, big brains, and grasping hands and feet. In addition, they clustered in tribal bands—an evolutionary trend that had emerged among many species, including ants and bees, millions of years earlier and was responsible for what Edward Wilson (2013) describes as the social conquest of earth. Proliferation of primates following the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago brought the total primate species to more than two hundred, with population numbers sufficient for long-term survival. But these advantages were much reduced for the few species that ventured out of the safety of their treetop world. Efficient bipedal locomotion that had developed around four million years BP freed up the forelimbs, thus allowing for new means of procuring food, carrying things, making handicrafts, and tool use, but the earliest humans were otherwise vulnerable in many ways. Ground-dwelling predators were bigger and faster while hominids lacked effective fangs, claws, horns, and hooves.

Despite these physical limitations, the brain size of hominids more than doubled over the past three million years and the last surviving species, Homo sapiens, eventually rose to become the most powerful species on Earth. Cognitive skills, language, and particularly the nebulous faculty of imagination were instrumental, although dating the ways these combined to create power over environmental hazards is virtually impossible. We can trace the growing power of mind, language, and imagination in the historical period through written records, but how these human skills originally came together in prehistoric times requires guesswork and inference. Nevertheless, what we know of prehistoric worldviews, common ritual patterns, and mythology indicates that power, both personal and tribal, emerged within a new reality created by language and imagination and shaped by narrative. Tribal lore concerning the surrounding world, recollection of whatever history could be remembered, and action to be taken in crucial situations—all these were embodied in narrative, in stories told and retold down the generations. The tenuous relation between mythic stories and historical fact is obvious from even the most superficial reading of familiar mythologies. We simply cannot discover any reliable account of history from mythic narrative. Yet the endurance of narrative—its repetition in the tribal environment and its transference through many generations—is a clear indication that narrative, even though it was not historical, nevertheless conferred power on both the storyteller and those who listened.

Dealing with the uncertainties of physical life entailed the creation of imaginative entities with superior powers. A belief in souls and other spiritual beings emerged as foundational in the worldviews of prehistoric peoples. So argued Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), a student of cultural anthropology who set out to classify the underlying cluster of beliefs of early humans he called animism. Tylor was an armchair Victorian anthropologist and a dedicated reader of scholarly reports flowing into Europe on tribal peoples whom George Peter Murdock (1934) called primitive contemporaries. Once the great explorers had rounded Africa, reached Asia, crossed the Atlantic, and made landfall in the Americas in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, the Age of Exploration turned into an Age of Inquiry. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scientists and ethnologists followed the explorers into these unknown lands. Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, and John James Audubon catalogued and illustrated new species of flora and fauna, while Henry Morgan, Richard Codrington, and dozens of ethnologists visited tribal peoples from the Americas to Melanesia. Tylor’s synthesis of all this occurred in his magnum opus, a 955-page, two-volume tome on primitive culture and religion where he attempted to examine systematically the spiritual views of primitive contemporaries by tracing the development of Animism through the beliefs reported by these anthropological pioneers. In the opening pages he described his role as an organizer of anthropological discoveries. Focusing on animism, he wrote that more than half of the present work is occupied with a mass of evidence from all regions of the world, displaying the nature and meaning of this great element of the Philosophy of Religion (1970, I.23).

Tylor’s presentation includes four observations from everyday experience that were available for prehistoric humans and today’s primitive contemporaries. These empirical and indisputable facts are universal experiences for us today:

(1) During sleep a person’s body is temporarily motionless until the person awakens.

(2) In dreams or trance we may see, hear, or meet people and encounter familiar things.

(3) After death a person’s body is permanently motionless and cannot be revived.

(4) Dreams may include encountering people recently deceased or long dead.

As experienced these are separate facts of everyday life, though with no obvious connection because, as we learn from historian Hayden White (1987, 9, 14), these isolated facts do not yet make a story. They are endowed with meaning by being identified as parts of an integrated whole. […] every fully realized story […] endows events, whether real or imaginary, with a significance that they do not possess as a mere sequence. The narrative foundation here is the presence or absence of a soul, especially the absence of the soul during sleep but also its permanent absence after death. In Tylor’s definition, the soul determines the difference between a living body and a dead one. The soul explains not only what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, death but also those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions. One narrative describes how the soul that temporarily leaves the body during sleep or trance may encounter souls of deceased relatives or friends that have remained close to the world of the living. Another narrative shows that the soul that leaves the body at death may travel elsewhere and take up residency in a separate land of the dead. In addition to the souls of familiar people in the land of the dead, the objects of the natural world (animals, trees, rivers, mountains) have powerful influences on human life; consequently, they are encountered by the soul after death. Thus Tylor’s animistic focus included other spirits […] [that] affect or control the events of the material world, and man’s life here and hereafter […] Animism in its full development, includes the belief in souls and in a future state (II.9–12). The narratives that emerged by joining the separate experiences of waking, dreaming, life, and death provided self-consistent stories that included and connected the empirical experiences of waking, dreaming, trance, and death.

Today Tylor is recognized as the founder of cultural anthropology and animism ranks as one of anthropology’s earliest concepts, if not the first. It is widely employed within the general language of ethnology and has turned out to be valuable for other disciplines as well (Bird-David 2000, 67). Tylor’s readers were cultured but smug Victorians who could revel in their superiority by reading about headhunters in Borneo, shamans in Africa, Indians in the Americas, and an array of other savages (Tylor’s designation for all primitive people). His readers might well discover for the first time what they would regard as quaint beliefs that animals and plants, rivers and oceans and mountains might possess a soul or spirit. How primitive compared to the eternal verities of Victorian civilization!

For Tylor, primitive contemporaries provided an array of materials for systematic analysis, which he gathered in Religion in Primitive Culture (1871). His theory was founded on the belief in a personal soul or spirit he discovered in scores of anthropological reports. Combining numerous details he defined the soul or spirit as a thin unsubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of vapour, film, or shadow; the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates; independently possessing the personal consciousness and volition of its corporeal owner, past or present. Though some details (vapour, film, or shadow) summon images of fictional creatures such as ghosts or zombies, belief in a personal soul remains familiar today because it corresponds with the classical and Christian psyche (Greek: soul), the Islamic ruh, the Hindu atman, the Chinese hun, and similar ideas in numerous contemporary traditions. This was one of Tylor’s primary complaints: belief in a personal soul in modern religion has evolved from and represents survivals from animistic beliefs—unfortunate survivals in his view.

Tylor’s definition continues with a series of imaginative actions attributed to souls. They are capable of leaving the body far behind, to flash swiftly from place to place; mostly impalpable and invisible, yet also manifesting physical power, and especially appearing to men waking or asleep as a phantasm separate from the body of which it bears the likeness. A final feature of his description shows it continuing to exist and appear to men after the death of that body of which it bears the likeness; able to enter into, possess, and act in the bodies of other men, of animals, and even of things (II.13). Today this cluster of beliefs in shadows, phantasms, apparitions, and ghosts has moved to the periphery and is no longer central to mainstream religion, nor has the primitive idea of spirit possession remained.

Setting aside the paternalistic but typically Victorian references to men rather than men and women, or people, we see that Tylor’s definition attaches several powers to the souls that express themselves in various ways. The separate and independent soul is the primary character in a plot with a variety of fictional subplots that illustrate its power. Life, health, sickness, and death were all narratives of the soul while everything in the material world was explained through stories of spiritual beings.

In this animistic worldview, all knowledge was personal, meaning that the entire world—men and women and children, Sun and Moon, plants and animals, seasons and storms, life and death, forests and mountains and oceans—was interpreted from the central experiences of persons, oneself and others. Put simply, there was no other way for primitive peoples to understand themselves, their existence, their world, weather, seasons, or the migrations of animals on which their lives depended.

Tylor’s Religion in Primitive Culture includes footnotes on virtually every page, hundreds throughout the book. His sources were originally published in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century newspapers, memoirs of explorers, ephemeral reports, and long-forgotten journals. With few exceptions his sources are now beyond recovery. However cultural anthropologists have revisited most of these tribal peoples and investigated many new cultures. The result has been that Tylor’s analysis of tribal beliefs around the world has been confirmed.

Several South African tribes hold similar views: encounters with traveling spirits in dreams, departing spirits at death. The Swazi people, one of some 400 Bantu-speaking tribes, believe the spirits of the dead depart to emadlotti (a world of spirits), but careless burial rituals can result in spirits returning to create mischief among the living. Belief in the superiority of spirits has resulted in a cult of the ancestors (Kuper 1963, 61–63). The Zulu people who occupy a coastal region adjacent to the Swazis believe in a two-part soul made up of iDlozi, a life principle akin to breath, and isiThunzi, a shadow that leaves at death to join amaDlozi (ancestral spirits) whose abode is underground. Here they enjoy a society similar to the lives of the living (Krige 1950, 283–84). Variations in this creative story are found not only throughout the numerous Bantu tribes but also among the Hottentots of Southwestern Africa where spirits are thought to emerge from the graves of the dead to appear in dreams and, in addition, they animate unusual events of weather and are accorded skills of causing grass to grow and herds to multiply—roles that are related to agriculture and animal husbandry. The also interfere with the living, causing sickness and disruptions in everyday life (Murdock 1934, 502–503). Control of spirits is managed through narrative fictions from tangoma (diviners) who are accorded great respect. They may identify the cause of illness as possession by a hostile spirit that requires ritual exorcism. The Zulu diviners channel information and wisdom from ancestral spirits which are embodied in stories. Belief in these stories with their appeal to the imaginative and affective side of the afflicted effectively fabricates power for the diviner, the patient, and the observing community (Kuper 1963, 64–68).

There is good reason for looking at beliefs where Robert Ardrey (1963) located the African genesis of Homo sapiens. South Africa was where the telltale mitochondrial DNA first appeared that was subsequently tracked throughout the female population of the planet (Cann et al. 1987), and recent genetic studies have narrowed the location quite precisely to northern Botswana (Chan et al. 2019). Now we know that genetic markers provide a trail of migration routes of Homo sapiens during their peopling of the planet. Following the Southern Dispersal Route from the east coast of Africa across the Gate of Grief at the south end of the Red Sea to the southern coast of Arabia, Homo sapiens followed what has been called the beachcomber route (Oppenheimer 2012). This led them along Indian Ocean coasts to Southeast Asia with some migrants turning north on the coast of East Asia. Eventually, over thousands of years, these migrants reached Siberia and Beringia, the broad expanse of land exposed between Siberia and Alaska now flooded by higher sea levels at the Bering Strait. From there migrants followed the Western Route from Beringia down the west coast of the Americas, eventually to Patagonia.

Some of this story comes from prehistoric tools found at occupation sites of prehistoric migrants. Commenting on the similarity between stone tools found in caves in Oman and tools from Sudan, Jeffrey Rose et al. (2011) referred to a trail of stone bread crumbs marking the coastal migration route. More precise chapters of this story come from genetic tracers from relict communities along the way that indicate the movements of ancestors millennia ago. But what can be traced through tools and genetics can also be discovered through prehistoric beliefs about the soul, its survival after death, dreams, and a world populated by spirits brought out of Africa over a migration period of 80 to 100 thousand years. Here we discover a trail of imaginative bread crumbs traceable across the planet. The animistic belief in souls and spirits is found among primitive contemporaries on every continent.

The Semai, indigenous Orang Asli (original people) predating the Malays, are found along the primary prehistoric migration route to Australia and eventually Melanesia. The Semai believe that humans have a ruai (soul) and kalong (spirit). The ruai has the form of the physical body that it may leave, meeting other ruai in its travels that are seen in dreams. Temporary "loss of ruai" can lead to listlessness, fever, and other ailments. This becomes serious if the ruai should fall under the influence of nyani’ (an evil spirit). The departure of the kalong for more than a week will lead to death. The Semai corrective to the power of evil spirits is the sing, which includes percussion music, chanting, and dancing to induce a trance. The narrative accompaniment assists the various steps of the sing, effectively dislodging the power of the ghosts, thus accentuating the power of the afflicted patient and the community at large (Dentan 1968, 82–89).

A few hundred miles south, the Ma’anyan Dyaks of west-central Borneo call their animist world Kaharinga. According to their narrative, every living and inanimate thing is animated by a life force or spirit. Elaborate rituals are performed to keep the people in harmony with animals and ancestral spirits of the departed. Expertise in managing these rituals resides in a wadian (female shaman) who is not only a religious specialist but the repository of tribal history, lore, and customs. These are communicated through ritual chants, the mastery and performance of which is a healing exercise (Hudson 1963, 39–40). For preliterate tribal people, stories are their only means of knowing. Stories reiterated during ceremonies that may last several days provide a fictive context for individual and communal healing, well-being, and power. Homo sapiens reached Australia 65,000 years ago (Clarkson 2017). Here at the extremity of southern migration, Australian aborigines trace their origin to Dreamtime, a spiritual past before time began that is understood entirely through narrative—myths, stories, and legend told by aboriginal women.

While Australia represented an end of the world for some Asian migrants, others turned north and followed the East Asian coasts of Vietnam, China, and Siberia, leaving skeletal and tool remains in the Philippines and Taiwan. Thousands of years later, the ancestors of today’s Ainu people had reached the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido. Here we find again the underlying narrative of souls and spirits. For the Ainu, humans have a spiritual double, a soul that may venture away from the body in dreams and trance, and a life-giving spirit whose permanent departure occurs at death when the spirit retires to an underworld where life is organized the same way it was during life. Returning spirits are responsible for sickness and must be placated with careful rituals. In addition to humans, plants and animals possess a double soul. As George Peter Murdock describes their Ainu descendants, they were thoroughgoing animists (1934, 182–83).

Homo sapiens eventually reached Beringia where they were blocked for millennia by glaciers. But once glacial melt permitted around 14,000 years ago, migrants separated and followed different migration routes. The polar Eskimos who moved east along the northern coasts of Alaska and Canada to Greenland retained the narrative that humans have two spiritual natures, a name and a soul, with the name signifying a spiritual entity. The name remains during life; it is the primary identity of the Eskimo, who inherits qualities of someone after whom she is named. At death, the name leaves and may enter the body of a pregnant woman whose offspring inherits the qualities of the deceased. The ghosts of the dead may visit the living, causing them to dream of departed ancestors. As with earlier tribal peoples, the Eskimos believe animals, too, have souls (Murdock 1934, 215–16).

It seems obvious that tribal peoples who spread across thousands of miles over a time span of more than 100,000 years would be unlikely to develop similar worldviews about souls, survival of souls, return of souls during dreams, and souls inhabiting animals, plants, and inanimate things. Separated by vast stretches of time and space, they could no more evolve identical beliefs than they could spawn identical genetic mutations. Beliefs, ideas, and ideologies are as continuous and revealing as genetic markers, handicrafts, language, and culture. It is no surprise then that as we follow Homo sapiens down the west coast of Canada and the Americas, we find similar narratives among the First Nations Haidas of British Columbia (Murdock 1934, 256–57), the Native American coastal Salish of Washington State (Ashwell 1978, 70–79), the numerous Ohlone tribes of the San Francisco–Monterey Bay area (Margolin 1978, 145–49), the Washoe of California and Nevada (Downs 1966, 55–60), and far to the south the Yanomamo and Canela tribes of South America (Chagnon 1968, 106–9; Crocker and Crocker 2004, 85–90).

This sequence of North American tribes down the primary migration route does not imply that belief in souls, spirits, and animism is a west coast phenomenon. Migrants from the west coast also traveled inland, following the Fraser, Skagit, Columbia, and Colorado Rivers and hundreds of lesser streams carrying with them the primary fictions of traveling souls and an afterlife of ancestral ghosts.

Tylor’s massive study of animism laid the groundwork for a generation of brilliant anthropologists whose excavation of primitive cultures led to the foundational beliefs of prehistoric humans. The spiritual world they unveiled uncovered not only the underlying assumptions of animism but also the underlying narratives of power that have dominated civilization and culture to modern times. It began with Richard Codrington’s two-decade (1863–87) immersion in Melanesian culture during which he discovered the foundational idea of mana. It was, he wrote in The Melanesians, a belief in a force altogether distinct from physical power, which sets in all kinds of ways for good and evil, and which it is of the greatest advantage to possess or control. In the Melanesian mind, mana was a supernatural power or influence […] beyond the ordinary power of men, outside the common processes of nature. It may attach itself to persons and things. It is a noun: a thing which possesses mana is said to be mana; it is also a verb (manag, manahi, manangi), which means to influence, to transfer, or to convey mana. The key to the significance of mana is its transferability to spirits and souls and thus the energy motivating Tylor’s animistic souls and spirits (Codrington 1972, 118–19).

Nine years after Codrington’s study, Robert Marett (1900) published Pre-Animistic Religion where he linked Melanesian mana with Lakota Sioux wakan and the Fiji Islanders’ kalou. Then J. N. B. Hewitt published his landmark essay Orenda and the Definition of Religion (1902) in which he described orenda as the Iroquoian life force found in the rocks, the waters, the tides, the plants and the trees, the animals and man, the wind and the storm, the clouds and the thunders and lightnings, the swift meteors, the benign light of day, the sinister night, the sun and the moon, the bright stars, the earth and the mountains thereof, specifying that it was equivalent to Algonquian manitou, Huron iarenda, Tuscarora urente, Siouan wakanda or mohopa, and Shoshonean pokunt. His singling out of orenda as the definition of religion itself was taken up by Robert Marett in his influential volume, The Threshold of Religion (1909). The anthropological foundation for spiritual narrative was laid bare.

With Lewis Spence’s Myths and Legends of the American Indians, the animating power of orenda was unpacked through an assembly of myths, legends, and beliefs of the Iroquois, Algonquins, Sioux, and Pawnees. Scores of Native American tribes believed in a spiritual power inhabiting both animate and inanimate things; thus the Native American

imagines every surrounding object to be, like himself, instinct with life. Trees, the winds, the river (which he names the Long Person), all possess life and consciousness in his eyes. The trees moan and rustle, therefore they speak, or are, perchance the dwelling place of powerful spirits. The winds are full of words, sighings, warnings, threats, the noises without doubt, of wandering powers, friendly or unfriendly beings. (Spence 1994, 80)

Better than most anthropological explanations, Spence’s explanation illuminates features of the natural world that can still inspire today’s people to understand the Native American vision of nature as alive with power.

While primitive bands migrated along seashores throughout prehistory, eventually peopling the planet, others settled and remained in place. Inland migrants created riverine communities on the Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, Mekong, Huang Ho, Fraser, Skagit, and Columbia Rivers. Here a threshold was crossed: beliefs began to change among those who settled and adopted agriculture and animal husbandry beginning around 12,000 years BP. Spiritually defuse powers of mana, orenda, wakan and pokunt now focused on the sun, seasons, weather, domestic animals, and edible grains. Spiritual forces retained the narrative coloring of personal souls while amorphous spirits evolved into specific beings: narrative entities displaying their own personal identities. In the period following the agricultural revolution from 10,000 to 2000 BCE, primeval spirits evolved into environmental deities: Shamish (Sun god), Poseidon (ocean god), Iris (rainbow goddess), Ganga (river goddess), Pele (volcano goddess), Wotan (storm god), Hathor (cow goddess), Ceres (grain goddess), and culture-specific deities of the Moon, planets, stars, constellations, winds, and mountains. Then, as permanent city structures of civilization developed, deities took on culture-guardian status: Hermes (god of roads), Janus (two-faced god of gates), Portunus (god of keys), and Terminus (god of boundary markers). In China, virtually every city evolved its own god of city walls: Yang Jianshan (Beijing), Huo Guang (Shanghai), Wen Tianxiang (Huangzhou). Eventually patron city deities emerged: Athena (Athens), Roma (Rome), Mumbadevi (Mumbai), Huitzilopochtli (Tenochtitlan). The original worldview of spirits throughout nature remained as foundational for extended pantheons of Sumerian, Greek, Indian, Chinese, and Aztec deities altogether adding up to thousands.

Meanwhile primitive shamanistic practices continued to evolve with numerous variations that included the Chinese Festivals of the Hungry Ghosts (Wong 1987; Teiser 1988), the Sun Dances of the Cheyenne (Hoebel 1960, 89–92) and other Great Plains tribes, and the sand painting healing rituals of the Navaho people of Arizona (Reichard 1977). As cities grew, such outdoor rituals were progressively moved into ceremonial hogans and temples, then synagogues, churches, and mosques. Meanwhile shamans and sorcerers evolved into bishops, priests, and ayatollahs with each claiming spiritual power that ultimately traces to their prehistoric animist origins. Tylor lamented the connection between civilized Victorian religion and the primitive beliefs of savages; he would have preferred a European religion distinct from its prehistoric origins. But as early tribal leaders evolved from headmen to chieftains and eventually kings, they retained their tribal authority and were imbued with progressively stronger spiritual powers. The way was prepared for the divine rulers of the Sumerians, anointed kings of Israel, the consecrated emperors of Rome, the deva-rajas (god-kings) of India, the pontiffs of the Roman Catholic Church, the Chinese emperor’s T’ien-ming (Mandate from Heaven), and European monarchs who claimed the Divine Right of Kings until modern times.

Scientifically, the belief in the traveling spirits of prehistoric times is an empty concept. So too is the notion of a nonmaterial power that formed a foundation for primitive worldviews worldwide. Its continuance as focused spiritual power in kings, priests, and lawgivers is similarly devoid of scientific meaning. But imaginatively, spiritual forces are the drivers of narrative knowing that accounts for the motions of rainstorms and rivers and the motivations of animals and humans. As such, transformed spiritual energy has taken on the shape of fictional history and the fabrication of power that continues today.

PART ONE

KINGS AND EMPERORS

Chapter 1

DIVINE KINGSHIP IN MESOPOTAMIA

The earliest narratives of kingship and kingship power appeared in the third millennium BCE in Mesopotamia. Charles Keith Maisels (1990) places the emergence of civilization in this region with particularly rich evidence from the Zagros Mountains of Iraq, the mountainous regions of south-central Turkey, and the river valleys of northern Syria. The claim by Samuel Noah Kramer (1956) that history begins at Sumer applies to the supremacy of the Sumerian kings. Their mythic legacy was transferred through subsequent civilizations that arose throughout the Fertile Crescent, the well-watered plains bounded on the east and north by the highlands of the Zagrosian Arc. The decline of glaciation that had lasted for millennia may well have induced climate change that led to a warming trend of particular benefit for the Mesopotamian Valley and adjacent regions (Mithen 2003). The Middle East, along with the peripheral areas of Iran, Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, has been the most thoroughly studied of any region in the world through scores of archaeological excavations since the nineteenth century. Despite the inevitable attrition of records, loss of written materials, and the looting of ancient ruins and graves, enough from this region has survived to develop a reasonably coherent history of leadership in the earliest urban centers. Mesopotamia provides a template for this development that is not always so evident in other cultures or regions.

Inscriptional, literary, and archaeological records show that the power and authority for leaders emerged early based on narratives that set them apart from the general population. The central narrative was an uncompromising status of divinity applied to the Sumerian kings. The efficacy of such invented stories rested on their power to capture the imaginations of the people, focusing attention on their leaders by attributing them with uncontestable authority, and motivating the people to act on their behalf. The idea of Sumerian kings as sharing in the divine took time to develop, but once it became the dominant narrative, its origins were projected millennium into the past.

One of the earliest accounts of kingship, the Sumerian King List, is a part-historical part-mythic list of ancient kings. It remained central to Mesopotamian culture from its composition early in the second millennium for at least the next 16 centuries. According to the King List, which exists in several copies, kingship was said to have descended from heaven, and after a great flood had swept over the land, it descended from heaven a second time (Jacobsen 1939). This narrative, which traces a movement of descent from the supernatural to the natural realm, provided the foundation for another narrative: someone who rose to assume this divinely given institution could then become a