THE CONSTRUCTION AND PERFORMANCE OF KINGSHIP IN THE NEO-ASSYRIAN EMPIRE

Abstract

The institution of kingship is such an important component of ancient societies as to be considered nearly universal by many scholars. In spite of this, discussions of kingship, especially in the ancient Near East, are surprisingly rare in the scholarly literature. Furthermore, the nature of the data pertaining to the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which includes a vast textual corpus and rich archaeological remains, means that this data set is often difficult for non-specialists to access. The goal of this paper is to reexamine and synthesize some well-known arguments, combine them with a number of new ideas about how kingship was constructed and performed in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and present the resulting analysis to a wider, anthropologically oriented audience. To do so, 1 step back from the philological minutiae that so often hinder the cross-cultural or interregional integration of Near Eastern data to examine three easily comparable structural components of kingship: ideology, legitimacy, and implementation.