Let us begin here: kings as a social institution derive their origins from religious more even than from political circumstances, and there is no singular category of “king” that successfully describes every historical institution we typically lump together under that word. Egyptian pharaohs, Judahite mal’kim, the Sumerian lugal, the Iranian shah, the Chinese and Korean wang, the Japanese tennō, the Greek basileus—each of these performs similar enough functions in their respective premodern contexts that talking about them as species of “kingship” is conventionally appropriate but conceptually unhelpful the deeper we descend into any reasonable analysis. For each of these positions was (and in just a handful of cases still is) so deeply ensconced in a cultic and mythic world that helps to parse its deepest meaning that one had to have been there, or at least try to go there imaginatively, to fully get what’s going on in premodern kingship discourse. In Egypt, Canaan, and Mesopotamia, for instance, a commonality of kingship is detectable in a package of ideas and ritual practices that designate the king as, among other things, high priest to the gods, warrior of the gods, son of the gods, and occasional incarnation of the gods or deified human himself, whether in this life or the next; as the divine representative and avatar, the king has a responsibility to preserve order (maat) and hold chaos (isfet) at bay, to create civilization and preserve the cultural lifeways that realize divine order in the human realm.
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