by Faun Rice
(Plutarch Moralia 173b).
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
425
a Land of Darkness to obtain the Waters of Life, but in the end, he loses it to
someone else—not a snake, this time, but his own cook and daughter, whom he
then punishes by casting them out to live forever with nothing further to show
for themselves (Dawkins 1937; Stoneman 1995: 98–99; Szalc 2012).45
One can actually see this as a little structural inversion: Semiramis was a
queen betrayed by her son, responded with uncharacteristic grace, and thus
achieved immortality; Alexander was a king betrayed by his daughter, respond-
ed with uncharacteristic fury, and thus did not. In any case, in every version of
the Romance, his quest to become a god proves unsuccessful.46 As an Axial Age
hero, the best he can do is finally listen to the various sages, angels, yogis, and
philosophers he encounters in his journeys and learn to understand and accept
his mortal limitations.
* * *
Alexander, then, did attain immortality but only by becoming a kind of Every-
man foolishly pursuing immortality.
The advantage of these stories, however fantastic, is that they bring home
what was felt to be at stake in absolute sovereignty. It’s important to be explicit
about my use of terms here. Sovereignty, in the sense we’ve been using it here,
was something of a latecomer in Bronze Age Western Asia, whose political
landscape had long been a checkerboard of temples, palaces, clans, tribes, au-
tonomous cities, and urban neighborhoods. Not only were most “empires” really
galactic polities of one sort or another, rulers rarely had sovereign (i.e., arbitrary)
power outside their own palaces, and those who insisted on creating something
45. In the original Romance, the cook, Andreas, discovers the Waters of Life when,
ordered to boil a fish for dinner in the Land of Darkness, he takes some water from
a fountain, and observes the fish come back to life. He drinks some, and preserves
some in a bottle, which he offers to the king’s daughter Kale in exchange for sexual
favors. Alexander has him tossed into the ocean with weights tied to him and he
becomes a sea god, Kale is merely exiled. In later versions, she becomes the sea
goddess Nereis. In the Islamic tradition, however, Andreas the cook becomes al-
Khidr, the “Green Man,” who, though he does make his home in the sea, is also a
sage and mystic who wanders the earth eternally, helping strangers or guiding them
to enlightenment.
46. In fact, he fails to attain immortality in both the divine, and genealogical sense: in
the story his daughter becomes an exile; his son, in fact, was killed in a palace coup
not long after his death.
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like an empire of conquest and either declaring themselves world-rulers (e.g.,
Sargon, c. 2340–2284 bc; Frankfort 1948: 228; Liverani 1993) or claiming di-
vine status (Naram-Sin, c. 2254–2218 bc; the kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur,
c. 2112–2004 bc) achieved immortality only in the sense of being remembered
for centuries thereafter as models of wickedness (Cooper 1983, 2012). Rulers
of the Akkadian, Assyrian, Median, and Achaemenid empires aspired to uni-
versal sovereignty in principle. But it’s largely in the wildly exaggerated stories
that accumulated around figures like Semiramis and Alexander —who not only
rule the world, but seem to encounter no significant popular resistance—that
we have a clear sense of what was ultimately at stake even in success. Each of
these rulers became obsessed with outdoing earlier ones. Each sought immor-
tality by (1) transforming the landscape by works of monumental architecture
or engineering, (2) having their exploits and achievements preserved in legend
and romance, and (3) attempting to found an enduring and flourishing dynasty
(here again Semiramis did better than Alexander: her son Ninyas was said to
have been succeeded by a long line of descendants).47
The problem is that the first two often appear to be in direct contradiction
to the third—so much so that one might be justified in saying we are in the
presence of a structural contradiction. The more one succeeds in transcending
the frames of mortal existence, the more one’s latter-day epigones are placed
in a position of structural rivalry to one’s memory. Here we might consider
the case of Egypt, where, quite unusually in the Bronze Age world, kings did
indeed attain the status of gods with absolute sovereign power over their do-
minions. Pharaohs were incarnate divinities, manifestations of Horus; they did
not die, and many of their tombs were so enormous that (as we are periodically
reminded on TV) they can still be seen from outer space. Yet for this very reason
the greatness of any one pharaoh must have been an enormous burden on his
children, who literally existed in the shadow of the dead. By the time we reach
the reign of the last pharaoh of the fifth dynasty, Unas (c. 2352–2322 bc), that
is, the end of the pyramid age, we also find a king who had to contend with the
existence of nineteen different monumental pharaonic tombs, each of a known
predecessor, who was also a deity, lingering immortally inside it.
47. This is not an exhaustive list of ways that successful rulers might seek immortality.
At the very least one could add: (4) the creation of laws or institutions that endure
long after one’s death; (5) the collection of famous heirlooms and exotic/distant
treasures (Helms 1993); and (6) the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom,
such as Alexander did in founding the Alexandrian Library. But these are less
immediately relevant to the argument at hand.
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
427
Back in the 1960s, Lewis Mumford (1967: 168–87, 206–23; cf. Fromm
1973) made the argument that the divine kingships of the Bronze Age were
in part the result of the emergence of new social technologies. While Egyptian
mechanical technology was extremely limited—they had little more than pulleys
and inclined planes—they had already developed production-line techniques of
breaking up complex tasks into a series of very simple machine-like actions and
then distributing them across a vast army of people. The first complex machines
were thus made of human beings. These human machines, in turn, were brought
under the control of sovereign power through hierarchical chains of command
that, Mumford suggests, probably first emerged in military contexts. The result
was unprecedented. It gave ancient rulers power on a scale no human being
had ever previously experienced, and that very much went to their heads. One
reads of rulers ordering conquered cities torn down one day and rebuilt the next;
boasting of bizarre acts of mass sadism such as ordering the murder or mutila-
tion of tens of thousands in a day (whether these claims were actually true or not
is in a way of secondary importance). As an illustration of the emotional tone of
the violent megalomania that he saw as arising alongside this new mechanical
order, Mumford (ibid.: 184) refers us to Unas’ tomb inscriptions, which have
come to be referred to
by Egyptologists as “The Cannibal Hymn”:
The sky darkens; the stars go out; heaven’s vaults tremble; the bones of the earth
shake; the decans are stilled against them. They have seen Unas rising up in
power, as a god living on his fathers, feeding on his mothers . . . Unas it is who
devours people, and who lives upon gods . . . .
It is Shezemu [god of judgment] who butchers them for Unas, cooking
what’s inside them on his evening hearth stones. It is Unas who eats their magi-
cal powers, who swallows their souls. The great ones serve for his morning meal,
the middle-sized ones for his evening meal; the little ones for his meal at night.
Of the old gods and goddesses he makes his cooking hearth . . . .
Unas is the God; older than the eldest. Thousands go round for him; hun-
dreds offer to him. . . . Unas has risen again in the sky; he is crowned as Lord of
the Horizon. He has broken the joints of their vertebrae; he has taken the hearts
of the gods . . . . (After Eyre 2002: 7–10; cf. Piankoff 1968)
Mumford did have a point. It’s hard to imagine anything more megalomaniacal
than a man who claims to literally eat gods for breakfast. At the same time, it’s
hard to discount the fact that Unas’ pyramid was also one of the smallest of the
Old Kingdom, perhaps half the size of most of those around it in the Saqqara
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tomb complex (Bárta 2005), which were themselves a fraction of the size of
those at Giza. We seem to be witnessing an epic instance of overcompensation.
One is tempted to speak of pyramid envy.
Still I would argue that there is a deeper, and more fundamental problem
behind such grandiloquent posturing: How does one reconcile claims to abso-
lute and universal sovereignty with the lingering existence of previous monarchs
who continue to claim exactly the same thing? It’s difficult enough when one is
still a live king. The problem is only compounded when one is just another dead
one. This dilemma took a particularly acute form in Egypt, where the dead were
almost constantly present in one form or another: not only were their tombs
visible from the capital, each with attendant staffs of soul priests and funer-
ary estates, but, as David Wengrow (2006: 142–46, 220-31, 266) has shown,
bureaucratic structures of production in Egypt had originally emerged largely
through the need to manage their domains, and Old Kingdom records suggest
they continued to make up a very large part of Egypt’s economy (Muhs 2016:
42–45, 106, 125–26.) Another large chunk of the kingdom’s revenue was paid
directly to gods via various temples. Nineteen pyramids then meant nineteen
dead pharaohs, each with his own lands and administrative organization, com-
peting not only for ritual attention, but also for their share in the total surplus
production—that is, the grain, meat, and vegetables being extracted from the
peasants who inhabited rural estates. Unas’ claims to devour the gods (including
his own ancestors) might be seen as a defiant assertion of ultimate sovereignty
from one god surrounded by a host of equally hungry rivals.
* * *
Curiously, Egyptian monarchs were not the only ones to face this dilemma. The
situation for Inka emperors was if anything even more extreme.
The Inka succession system (Cobo [1653] 1979: 111, 248; Conrad 1981;
Zuidema 1990; Gose 1996a, 1996b; Jenkins 2001; Moore 2004; Yaya 2015)
is rarely discussed outside of the work of specialists, which is odd because it’s
clearly the key to understanding the rapid expansion of the Inka empire. The
latter is one of the few political entities that existed in the American hemi-
sphere before Columbus that is universally recognized to be a state, and it was
quite a formidable one, extending a uniform system of administration over a
territory that at its peak spanned some two thousand miles, from Ecuador to
Chile. The basis of the almost frenetic pace of its expansion (its rulers conquered
a territory that stretched two thousand miles in little more than a century) lay in
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
429
a system which ensured that dead rulers continued to hold almost all the powers
and privileges they had in life.
Inheritance was patrilineal, and sovereign power passed from a dead Inka to
his eldest, or most capable, son. Sovereign power, however, was almost the only
thing the new Inka inherited. Old kings were mummified, and the mummies
had to be treated in much the same way as a living person.
Upon the death of an Inca ruler the rights to govern, to wage war, and to impose
taxes on the empire passed directly to his principal heir, who became the next
head of state. However, the deceased emperor’s buildings, servants, chattel, and
other possessions continued to be treated as his property and were entrusted to a
corporate social group ( panaqa or royal ayllu) containing his other descendants.
These secondary heirs did not actually receive ownership of the items named
above; they derived their support from the panaqa’s own holdings. Instead, they
managed their ancestor’s property for him, using it to care for his mummy and
maintain his cult. In effect, a deceased emperor’s panaqa treated him as if he were
still alive. (Conrad 1981: 9)
Each new ruler, or Sapa Inka (“Unique Inka,” his singularity consisting in the
fact that he was still alive), was therefore expected to gather together a company
of warriors and conquer new territories with which to support his own court,
wives, and retainers. In the meantime, his father’s mummy carried on much as
before, attending rituals, managing his property, holding regular court at his ur-
ban palace or country estates, and throwing feasts for visiting notables, at which
his will would be conveyed by mediums (Gose 1996a: 19–20).
Not al rulers would become estate-owning mummies: some died “bad
deaths” and their bodies were destroyed or not recovered; others died before they
had managed to conquer any territories of their own to begin with (Yaya 2015:
651). Still, the accumulation of palaces made Cuzco, the Inka capital, into a very
unusual sort of city, with an ever-increasing number of fully staffed royal palaces
(Rowe 1967: 60–61), each the ritual focus on an ever-burgeoning panaqa made
up of all descendants of the (non-succeeding) children of the former king.
One reason such an arrangement is so unusual is that it brings out a fun-
damental contradiction in the logic of dynastic rule—one which most systems
attempt to finesse in one way or another, but which is impossible to ignore in
situations when old kings are still physically present in such dramatic ways. The
contradiction is that while older monarchs will always tend to outrank younger
ones (partly simply by the principle of seniority, partly in most cases too because
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they are closer to the charisma of the original stranger-king founder of the
dynasty), their descendants will tend to be ranked the other way around: those
particularly identified with the earlier rulers will tend to rank lower than those
identified with more recent ones, and their position in
the total genealogical
order will continue to decline steadily as time goes on.
This sounds counterintuitive at first, but it makes perfect sense if you con-
sider how such ranked lineage systems work. If you imagine a genealogy start-
ing with King A, and proceeding through A’s eldest son, King B, then B’s eldest
son, King C, and so on, then the descendants of the younger (noninheriting)
sons of King A have only declining status to look forward over time. After all,
the younger sons of King B are still descended from King A (King B’s father),
the younger sons of King C still descended from A and B as well, and so forth,
down to the children of the present king today, who are of course princes, and of
the highest rank of all. Nonetheless, a lineage founded by the younger children
of King A, the founder of the dynasty, and only descended from King A and not
any of the others, will tend to be identified with King A, typically be charged
with taking care of his tomb or shrines or relics, or otherwise maintain a special
ritual status based on their identification with the founder of the dynasty and
greatest of all kings. And the descendants of King B will likely enjoy a slightly
lower ritual status, of C lower than that, and so on.
Thus, the lowest-ranking royal lineage will be the guardian of the memory
of the highest-ranking royal ancestor.
Lineages where everyone is ranked in order of birth are referred to in the
anthropological literature as “conical clans” or “ramages,” and their implications
have been worked out in detail (Kirchhoff 1949, 1955; Sahlins 1958; for appli-
cation to the Inka case, Jenkins 2001). If the founder of a lineage has three chil-
dren—let’s assume for simplicity’s sake that whether they are sons or daughters
doesn’t matter, which is in fact often the case—then they are ranked numbers 1,
2, and 3, but if each of those has three children, the children of the second are
no longer number 2, but numbers 4, 5, and 6, in the next generation, numbers
10–19, and so on. The technical term for this is “sinking status” (H. Geertz and
C. Geertz 1975: 124–31; C. Geertz 1980: 26–32). If one does not become king,
one’s descendants have no place to go but down, and one can expect one’s line