This book assesses how Middle Eastern leaders manipulated visuals to advance their rule from around 4500 BC to the 19th century AD. In nine fascinating narratives, it showcases the dynamics of long-lasting Middle Eastern traditions, dealing with the visualization of those who stood at the head of the social order.

Picturing Royal Charisma assesses how Middle Eastern leaders manipulated visuals to advance their rule from around 4500 BC to the 19th century AD. In nine fascinating narratives, it showcases the dynamics of long-lasting Middle Eastern traditions, dealing with the visualization of those who stood at the head of the social order. The contributions discuss: Mesopotamian kings who cast themselves as divine representatives in art; the relationships between the ?king of men? and ?king of beasts? ? the lion; Akhenaten?s visual conception of a divine king without hybrid attributes; the royal image as guiding movements of visitors in the palace of Nimrud; continuities in the functions and representation of Neo-Assyrian eunuchs that survived in the Achaemenid, Sasanian, Byzantine and Islamic courts; the triumphal arch of the emperor Titus and its reflections in Christian Constantinople; patterns of authority and royal legitimacy in 3rd century AD Palmyra and Rome; the use of the Biblical past in the construction of kingship in 12th century Crusader Jerusalem; and the use of ?the power of images? by Islamic rulers, adopting visuals of thrones and throne-rooms despite Islamic opposition to the figurative portrayal of kings.

This book analyzes the history of Mesopotamian imagery form the mid-second to mid-first millennium BCE. It demonstrates that in spite of rich textual evidence, which grants the Mesopotamian gods and goddesses an anthropmorphic form, there was a clear abstention in various media from visualizing the gods in such a form. True, divine human-shaped cultic images existed in Mesopotamian temples. But as a rule, non-anthropomorphic visual agents such as inanimate objects, animals or fantastic hybrids replaced these figures when they were portrayed outside of their sacred enclosures. This tendency reached its peak in first-millennium Babylonia and Assyria. The removal of the Mesopotamian human-shaped deity from pictorial renderings resembles the Biblical agenda not only in its avoidance of displaying a divine image but also in the implied dual perception of the divine: according to the Bible and the Assyro-Babylonian concept the divine was conceived as having a human form; yet in both cases anthropomorphism was also concealed or rejected, though to a different degree. In the present book, this dual approach toward the divine image is considered as a reflection of two associated rather than contradictory religious worldviews. The plausible consolidation of the relevant Biblical accounts just before the Babylonian Exile, or more probably within the Exile - in both cases during a period of strong Assyrian and Babylonian hegemony - points to a direct correspondence between comparable religious phenomena. It is suggested that far from their homeland and in the absence of a temple for their god, the Judahite deportees adopted and intensified the Mesopotamian avoidance of anthropomorphic picorial portrayals of deities. While the Babylonian representations remained confined to temples, the exiles would have turned a cultic reality - i.e., the nonwritten Babylonian custom - into a written, articulated law that explicity forbade the pictorial representation of God.

Memory is a constructed system of references, in equilibrium, of feeling and rationality. Comparing ancient and contemporary mechanisms for the preservation of memories and the building of a common cultural, political and social memory, this volume aims to reveal the nature of memory, and explores the attitudes of ancient societies towards the creation of a memory to be handed down in words, pictures, and mental constructs. Since the multiple natures of memory involve every human activity, physical and intellectual, this volume promotes analyses and considerations about memory by focusing on various different cultural activities and productions of ancient Near Eastern societies, from artistic and visual documents to epigraphic evidence, and by considering archaeological data. The chapters of this volume analyse the value and function of memory within the ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian societies, combining archaeological, textual and iconographical evidence following a progression from the analysis of the creation and preservation of both single and multiple memories, to the material culture (things and objects) that shed light on the impact of memory on individuals and community.

From Palestine to Iran and from Alexander the Great to Zechariah, Who's Who in the Ancient Near East presents a unique and comprehensive reference guide for all those with an interest in the ancient history of the area.

Abstract: In the ancient world, kings were a common subject of literary activity, as they played significant social, economic, and religious roles in the ancient Near East. Unsurprisingly, the praiseworthy deeds of kings were often memorialized in ancient literature. However, in some texts kings were remembered for criminal acts that brought punishment from the god(s). From these documents, which date from the second to the first millennium BCE, we learn that royal acts of sacrilege were believed to have altered the fate of the offending king, his people, or his nation. These chastised rulers are the subject of this this dissertation. In the pages that follow, the violations committed by these rulers are collected, explained, and compared, as are the divine punishments that resulted from royal sacrilege. Though attestations are concentrated in the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamian literature, the very fact that the chastised ruler type also surfaces in Ugaritic, Hittite, and Northwest Semitic texts suggests that the concept was an integral part of ancient near eastern kingship ideologies. Thus, this dissertation will also explain the relationship between kings and gods and the unifying aspect of kingship that gave rise to the chastised ruler concept across the ancient Near East.

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.