by Faun Rice
der to demote his descendants (see chapter 2). Even the much more powerful
Ganda kings were sometimes foiled in similar attempts. When one particularly
high-handed kabaka ordered the shrine of a divinized ancestor be burned to
the ground, “a spark from the burning shrine flew up and burned the Queen
Mother’s breast,” leaving a wound that continued to pain her until the king
finally relented and ordered the shrine be restored to its former state (Kagwa
1971: 74; Wrigley 1996: 211).53
53. General y speaking, it would seem that royal ancestors were seen as not particularly
remarkable ancestral spirits by royals, and as gods by everyone else (Ray 1991: 150–53).
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ON KINGS
For kings to erase ancestral memories, then, requires extreme measures, and
those measures may backfire. Attempts to wipe ancestors out of history, as, for
instance, the New Kingdom pharaoh Thutmoses III famously tried to wipe out
his mother Hatshepsut and her steward Senenmut, rarely succeed (though ad-
mittedly if such a project did succeed completely, we would not know about it).54
Still, even when ancestors cannot be destroyed, they can be marginalized or
made irrelevant. Stranger-kingship itself might be seen in some cases as a way
of wiping the slate clean by starting over somewhere else. Another approach is
to mark some sort of fundamental break or rupture so as to announce a new
dynasty. Obviously, this is more likely to be an expedient used by popular forces
or court officials against sitting kings, but there are also cases where the dynastic
break appears to be internal. The case of Unas is again instructive. He is consid-
ered the last ruler of the Fifth Dynasty, but in fact there is no evidence his suc-
cessor, Teti, was an outsider in any particular sense (W. S. Smith 1971: 189–91;
Rice 2003: 210; Grimal 1988: 79–81)—most of Unas’ court officials remained
in place, and the new pharaoh, presumably from at least a collateral branch of
the ruling line, appears to have married one of the old pharaoh’s daughters to
preserve continuity. He also founded a new capital further from the old burial
grounds and built two pyramids, in addition to his own, for his primary wives,
all of which suggests an effort to restart the historical memory—and, presum-
ably, limit the postmortem ambitions of the overweening Unas. In the latter
endeavor he had only very limited success, since Unas was later revived as a local
deity, and was still receiving popular cult around Saqqara many centuries later
during the Middle and New Kingdoms, by which time Teti would appear to
have been largely forgotten (Malek 2000: 250–56).
This leads to the final peril of attempts to marginalize earlier rulers, ances-
tors or otherwise: that even if the social apparatus by which their memories are
maintained is thoroughly uprooted, they may become popular heroes, taken up
as a weapon on the other side of the constitutive war between king and people.
This often happens at the end of dynasties. The first recorded case we have is,
surprisingly, the Emperor Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudians. Nero is now
54. I should emphasize that I am speaking here of the difficulty of destroying the
memories of a king’s own ancestors. The systematic destruction and/or desecration
of the apparatus of memory for conquered rulers is a regular practice; our first
historical record of such practices coming from the Assyrian empire, which would
regularly attempt to uproot and destroy the memory of conquered dynasties
(Suriano 2010: 65–67), but the practice is commonplace.
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
439
remembered through the eyes of his enemies as a monster, a bloodthirsty psy-
chopath who, ridiculously, fancied himself a great poet, actor, and musician. But
even in the official accounts there are strong indications that his eccentricities
actually cut quite the other way: during his early reign he systematically re-
fused to sign death warrants, and even ordered that gladiators no longer fight
to the death at games he sponsored. (He did, however, on one occasion order
that senators themselves take part in the now bloodless fencing contests, which
might begin to explain some of the vitriol.) He also attempted to negotiate
a permanent peace with Rome’s main imperial rival Parthia.55 Odd though it
may seem, Nero was about as close to a pacifist as Rome produced. He might
have gone a bit further than some in trying to glorify his name and preserve his
memory (“he took the former appellations from many things and numerous
places and gave them new ones from his own name. He also called the month
of April Neroneus and was minded to name Rome Neropolis” [Suetonius, Nero
55]). After Nero was overthrown in a military coup in ad 68, all of this appa-
ratus of memory was immediately dismantled, he became one of the few Julio-
Claudians never to be deified,56 and attempts were made to paint him as a tyrant
so awful that the subsequent imposition of military rule was entirely justified
(Henderson 1905; Griffin 1984; Champlin 2003).
Most of Nero’s former subjects, apparently, disagreed. Already in ad 96, we
read that “even now, everybody wishes Nero were still alive; and the great ma-
jority believe that he is” (Dio Chrysostom 21.10). Three different pretenders
55. Nero’s misfortune was that while he was anything but brutal by Roman standards,
those relative few on whom he did vent his wrath—Christians, who were widely
held to have been responsible for the fire that devastated Rome in ad 64, and the
senatorial class, after many, including his former mentor Seneca, were implicated
in an assassination plot in ad 65—were precisely those who wrote later histories.
For what it’s worth, I have always personally suspected that Christians (perhaps
the Peter faction) actually were at least partly responsible for the great fire—some
certainly can be seen to be gloating about it in Revelations 18.8-20—and that Nero
might not have actually died in ad 68 at all, since the account of his suddenly
abandoning a plan to flee to the east for no particular reason and instead killing
himself (Suetonius Nero 48–49) seems novelistic and implausible. For all we know,
the “imposter” who ended up in Persia was really him.
56. Normal practice was to deify emperors only after their deaths so the reigning
princeps could be referred to as “son of a god” ( divi filius). Nero thus duly deified his
adopted father Claudius, and later added his wife Poppaea and daughter Claudia,
but for obvious reasons he did not receive the same honors after his own death
(Woolf 2002: 250).
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ON KINGS
claiming to be Nero appeared in the eastern provinces, at least one sparking a
widespread revolt; the Parthians kept another as a bargaining chip; and as late as
ad 410, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote that pagans still insisted Nero was sleep-
ing somewhere, waiting “until the time is right” to reclaim his throne, just as
Christians feared that, though dead, he would rise from the grave as Antichrist
( Civ. Dei 20.19.3). As one biographer writes:
The persistent expectation that
Nero would return from hiding (or from the
dead, in the negative formulation of the Antichrist) puts him into the select
company of historical figures whom people wanted to return, figures like King
Arthur, Charlemagne, Saint Olaf, Frederick Barbarossa, Frederick II, Constan-
tine XI, Tsar Alexander I, and Elvis Presley. (Champlin 2003: 21)
The latter, significantly, referred to as “the King.”57 To which list one might add
Cuatemoc in Mexico and Tupac Amaru in Peru. Almost every one of these was
a figure whose memory his successors had attempted, vainly, to suppress.
2. Becoming the dead
Another way to solve the problem is by declaring oneself the same person as
a previous, more famous ruler, or, even more, through a system of positional
succession, saying that all kings are effectively the same person. Think of this
perhaps as the ultimate extension of Marshall Sahlins’ “kinship” or “heroic I,”
whereby a Maori chief can tell an enemy, “I killed your grandfather,” referring
to an event that happened many centuries before (Prytz-Johansen 1954: 29–31;
Sahlins 1983a: 522–23; 2013: 36–37).
Stephanie Dalley (2005: 20) has argued that the former approach was quite
common in the ancient Middle East, where living monarchs could assimilate
themselves to more famous antecedents, “prototypes” of great rulers—as, say,
Sargon I of Assyria (722–705 bc) simply took on the name and persona of
Sargon of Akkad (c. 2340–2284 bc), or various independently minded queens
in the same part of the world all became “Semiramis.”58 One might say there is
57. For an excellent Durkheimian analysis of Elvis as messiah figure in the American
religion of consumerism, see Stromberg (1990).
58. “A striking feature of ancient Mesopotamian history is the naming of a new king
after a much earlier king of a different dynasty to whom he was unrelated. Sargon,
Naram-Sin, and Nebuchadnezzar are three obvious examples” (Dalley 2005: 20).
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
441
a strong form and a weak form of such identification. Almost all kings will play
this game in the weak sense: either by identifying with past heroes (as Edward
IV, to take a fairly random example, presented himself as a reincarnation of
King Arthur [Hughes 2002]), or just by all taking the same name: this is why in
the High Middle Ages almost all English monarchs were named either Henry
or Edward, and France had sixteen different kings named Louis. Attempting
this strategy in the strong sense of claiming to actually be Sargon, or Arthur, or
the last Louis, is relatively rare. All Shilluk reths are embodiments of the found-
er, “Nyikang,” but one reason the Shilluk kingship is considered so interesting
and exotic is because they are one of the few to take this principle to its logical
conclusion, and even among the Shilluk, it’s not as if the historical personalities
of individual sovereigns are actually wiped out.
In fact, positional succession systems, whereby whoever takes a given office
is assimilated to some historical prototype, are much more typical of relatively
egalitarian political orders like the seventeenth-/eighteenth-century Haudeno-
saunee (“League of the Iroquois”), where the characters said to have been in-
volved in the creation of the League centuries before were still very much alive:
the fire-keeper of the central Onondaga lodge was always Thadodaho; the Roll
Call of the Founders recorded the names of fifty original chiefs who were still
present at every League council (Morgan 1851: 64–65; Graeber 2001: 121–29;
Abler 2004). But these were societies where there was no real difference be-
tween names and titles, since each clan had a fixed stock of names, which could
only be portioned out by clan matrons one at a time, and the entire effect seems
to be to minimize the scope for personal self-aggrandizement.59 Kings tend to
avoid positional succession for exactly this reason. It might allow them to de-
stroy their ancestors’ ability to make a unique name for themselves, but only by
the sacrifice of their own.
There are few exceptions. Perhaps the most famous is the Luapulu king-
dom of Central Africa, whose ruler is always Kazembe (Cunnison 1956, 1957,
1959)—but only because the Luapulu dynasty appears to have conquered a
group of people who, very unusually for Africa, practice positional succession
in their lineages. (When a man or woman dies, for instance, another is given
their name, and accedes to their possessions and even family, though they are
59. For this reason, the two most famous figures in the epic, considered the founders of
the League—Deganawideh and Hiawatha—still exist as titles, but their positions
are never filled.
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ON KINGS
allowed after a brief decent interval to divorce an unwanted spouse acquired in
this way.) By far the more common pattern is the weak version exemplified by
the medieval notion of the “King’s Two Bodies” (Kantorowicz 1957), where the
king is a flesh-and-blood individual, capable of receiving personal allegiance,
and an immortal concept at the same time.
3. Outdoing the dead
This one is fairly self-explanatory; we’ve already seen how even kings who ac-
complish feats so extraordinary their own ancestors vanish (does anyone know
or care who Alexander’s grandparents were?) will make up some imaginary rival
like Semiramis to compete with. We’ve also seen how monarchs dealt with the
continued presence of mummified ancestors in political life in two very different
circumstances: in Peru, where each new Inka had to conquer a new territory to
feed their dependents; and in Egypt, where, the Nile Valley being circumscribed
and further opportunities for conquest rarely available, the result was an efflo-
rescence of monumental architecture unparalleled before or since.
Building monuments, of course, is effective only if one manages to attach
one’s name to that monument over the long term. It can be difficult to make
names stick. As we’ve seen in the case of Semiramis, if you establish enduring
fame—however you manage to attain it—you will also tend to get credit for all
sorts of monuments you did not build and probably never even touched or saw,
in much the way that all witty things said in late-nineteenth-century America
now tend to be attributed to Mark Twain, or in England, to either George
Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde, leaving those who actually did say the witty
things or build the various earthworks, walls, towers, and cities ascribed to the
queen to languish in obscurity.
There is another option I haven’t really discussed, however, and that’s a
hypertrophy of sovereignty itself, in the specific sense of arbitrary destructive
power. It is hard to find any other explanation for why, when kings do manage to
accumulate enough power that their kingdoms can be called “states”—basically
that tipping-point at which kings can be definitively said to win—one of the
first things they do is embark on some kind of campaign of ritualized murder.
Such massacres include the acts of mass sadism that, as Lewis Mumford used
&n
bsp; to point out (1967: 183–85), we so often squeamishly write out of history—the
massacres, torture, mutilation—but typically, in this initial phase at least, they
can justifiably be labeled human sacrifice.
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
443
For archaeologists, for instance, it is notorious that the mass slaughter of
retainers at the burial of rulers tends to mark the very first stages of the emer-
gence of states.60 It can sometimes escalate to the massacre of entire courts. The
phenomenon has been thoroughly documented among other places for early
Egypt, Ur, Nubia, Cahokia, China, Korea, Tibet, and Japan; as well as the Mo-
che in Peru, Scythians, and Huns (Childe 1945; Davies 1984; Parker Pearson
1999; van Dijk 2007; Morris 2007, 2014). It has also been documented ethno-
graphically in West Africa, India, and among the Natchez. As the final example
makes clear, when one is dealing with kings whose absolute and arbitrary power
was largely confined to the circle of their own court, such mass killings might
best viewed as a kind of final supernova of sovereignty—but a sovereignty still
incapable, for all its blazing out in glory, of bursting through its frames. It’s also
important to remember these sacrifices were organized not by the former king
(who was after all dead) but by his successor. In this light it’s telling that at least
two of the more dramatic cases of retainer sacrifice (Peru, early Egypt) are in
precisely places where later we find dead kings maintaining their own courts
and retinues, and competing with the living for a share of the surplus—suggest-
ing one motive might simply be to ensure this did not occur. Instead, in a curi-
ous twist, a final display of divine power that ostensibly catapults the ruler into
godhood also serves to wipe out the entire human apparatus that had served to,
in Audrey Richards’ (1964) felicitous phrase, “keep the king divine.”
Why, then, does it stop? Ellen Morris (2014: 86–87) suggests that, histori-
cally, retainer sacrifice tends to lead to a dangerous game of one-upmanship.
Other royal households, or just wealthy and powerful ones, will adopt the prac-
tice; kings will then feel they have to kill even more retainers to assert their ex-
ceptional nature. They will also, inevitably, come to measure themselves against