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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.įrom the very first inscriptional evidence, all Mesopotamian rulers are said to have been touched by the gods in one way or another, although only some Mesopotamian rulers were explicitly accorded divine status, and only in some periods. Several contributors to this volume have pointed out the Western, Judeo-Christian background of our categories of the human and the divine. 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. Yet the question of the divinity of the king-the king as god-has never before been examined within the framework of a cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary conference. More recently, several conferences have been held on kingship, drawing on cross-cultural comparisons. 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.

The purpose of this conference was to examine more closely concepts of kingship in various regions of the world and in different time periods.

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.

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