Kingship And The Gods

Download or read book Kingship and the Gods written by Henri Frankfort and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1978-07-15 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic study clearly establishes a fundamental difference in viewpoint between the peoples of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. By examining the forms of kingship which evolved in the two countries, Frankfort discovered that beneath resemblances fostered by similar cultural growth and geographical location lay differences based partly upon the natural conditions under which each society developed. The river flood which annually renewed life in the Nile Valley gave Egyptians a cheerful confidence in the permanence of established things and faith in life after death. Their Mesopotamian contemporaries, however, viewed anxiously the harsh, hostile workings of nature. Frank's superb work, first published in 1948 and now supplemented with a preface by Samuel Noah Kramer, demonstrates how the Egyptian and Mesopotamian attitudes toward nature related to their concept of kingship. In both countries the people regarded the king as their mediator with the gods, but in Mesopotamia the king was only the foremost citizen, while in Egypt the ruler was a divine descendant of the gods and the earthly representative of the God Horus.

Download or read book Kingship and the Gods written by Henri Frankfort and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book In the Garden of the Gods written by Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-07 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the evolution of kingship in the Ancient Near East from the time of the Sumerians to the rise of the Seleucids in Babylon, this book argues that the Sumerian emphasis on the divine favour that the fertility goddess and the Sun god bestowed upon the king should be understood metaphorically from the start and that these metaphors survived in later historical periods, through popular literature including the Epic of Gilgameš and the Enuma Eliš. The author’s research shows that from the earliest times Near Eastern kings and their scribes adapted these metaphors to promote royal legitimacy in accordance with legendary exempla that highlighted the role of the king as the establisher of order and civilization. As another Gilgameš and, later, as a pious servant of Marduk, the king renewed divine favour for his subjects, enabling them to share the 'Garden of the Gods'. Seleucus and Antiochus found these cultural ideas, as they had evolved in the first millennium BCE, extremely useful in their efforts to establish their dynasty at Babylon. Far from playing down cultural differences, the book considers the ideological agendas of ancient Near Eastern empires as having been shaped mainly by class — rather than race-minded elites.

Download or read book Ancient Egyptian Kingship written by David Bourke O'Connor and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1995 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This well-illustrated volume represents an extensive analysis of kingship in ancient Egypt. Each of the six contributing authors investigates particular areas of his own expertise. Among the topics covered are the origin of kingship, its distinctive traits and its general nature, and its reflection in royal art and architecture.

Download or read book Conceptualising Divine Unions in the Greek and Near Eastern Worlds written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is an interdisciplinary investigation and contextualization of the various concepts of divine union in the private and public sphere of the Greek and Near Eastern worlds.

Download or read book Religion and Power written by Nicole Maria Brisch and published by Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures. This book was released on 2008 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume represents a collection of contributions presented during the Third Annual University of Chicago Oriental Institute Seminar Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond, held at the Oriental Institute, February 23-24, 2007. The purpose of this conference was to examine more closely concepts of kingship in various regions of the world and in different time periods. The study of kingship goes back to the roots of fields such as anthropology and religious studies, as well as Assyriology and Near Eastern archaeology. More recently, several conferences have been held on kingship, drawing on cross-cultural comparisons. Yet the question of the divinity of the king as god has never before been examined within the framework of a cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary conference. Some of the recent anthropological literature on kingship relegates this question of kings who deified themselves to the background or voices serious misgivings about the usefulness of the distinction between divine and sacred kings. Several contributors to this volume have pointed out the Western, Judeo-Christian background of our categories of the human and the divine. However, rather than abandoning the term divine kingship because of its loaded history it is more productive to examine the concept of divine kingship more closely from a new perspective in order to modify our understanding of this term and the phenomena associated with it.

Download or read book Experiencing Power, Generating Authority written by Jane A. Hill and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-12-11 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experiencing Power, Generating Authority offers a cross-cultural comparison of the cosmic ideology and political structure of kingship in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.