Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour cleverly hidden at the intersection of religion, art, science, food, and politics. This is an open thread where we can share our thoughts and comments about the day. In today’s American politics, there are many people who feel that their god has laid down the rules for government. To understand the origins of god-given government, let’s look at ancient Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamia—the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—roughly corresponds with present day Iraq. It was here that some of the world’s cities emerged and some of the earliest kingdoms.
The idea that the right to rule stems from the gods (or from a single god) seems to have been formalized in ancient Mesopotamia around 2900 BCE. It is at this time that hereditary kingship evolved as the best way to administer a region and its population. In addition, it was also believed that the gods decreed the rules or laws for human behavior.
In his book Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study, Bruce Trigger writes:
“The Sumarians believed that the gods had invented kingship as the most effective means for governing themselves and had then transmitted it to humans.”
Bruce Trigger also writes:
“The king, standing at the apex of society, constituted the most important link between human beings and the supernatural forces on which the welfare of both society and the universe depended. These relations were mediated by rituals that only kings or their deputies were able to perform.”
In the Mesopotamian city-states, there was little distinction between religion and government. A temple to the god of the city was one of the main architectural features of the city and served as the dwelling place of the god. In his essay on Mesopotamia in The Grammar of the Ancient World, Andrew Kirk writes:
“The king was closely associated with the city god, and a statue of the king would share the temple space with the image of the god, symbolizing this relationship.”
Andrew Kirk also writes:
“The king’s authority was divinely ordained, and he was the representative of the city’s god.”
Warfare often developed between the various Mesopotamian city-states and warfare was closely associated with religion. Bruce Trigger reports:
“Mesopotamians believed that wars were fought at the command of the patron deities of city-states, whose will a king was supposed to be able to interpret.”
In a few instances, Mesopotamian rulers viewed themselves as more than just representatives of the god, but as gods themselves and/or as descendants of the gods. One of these was Naram-Sin who ruled the Akkadian Empire from 2254 BCE to 2218 BCE. In her book The Ancient Near East: A Very Short Introduction, historian Amanda Podany writes:
“Naram-Sin was so convinced of his own exalted status that he had himself deified (or, according to legend, acquiesced when his people chose to make him a god)—he was one of the very few Mesopotamian kings to do so.”
Ur-Namma, who founded the Sumerian third dynasty of Ur and who reigned from 2047 BCE to 2020 BCE, referred to himself as the son of the goddess Ninsun.
The gods were also involved in the creation of Mesopotamian laws. The best example of this is the code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi which dates to about 1700 BCE. Bruce Trigger reports:
“The Babylonian king Hammurabi claimed to have assembled his law code at the command of the god Utu, or Shamash, who, because as the sun god he saw everything that humans did, was also the patron deity of justice.”
In the Laws of Hammurabi, 264 lines of the text are devoted to curses. Amanda Podany reports:
“Each god was addressed individually and asked to create a special kind of terror for any future king who damages Hammurabi’s laws. Inanna, now called Ishtar, was to ‘strike down his warriors, drench the earth with their blood, make a heap of the corpses of his soldiers upon the plain, .. and as for him, may she deliver him into the hands of his enemies, and may she lead him bound captive to the land of his enemy.’”
Open Thread
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