Religion and Power.

• Position: Book review

Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond. Edited by NICOLE BRISCH. Oriental Institute Seminars, vol. 4. Chicago: The ORIENTAL INSTITUTE, 2008. Pp. xiii + 271, illus. $24.95 (paper).

A significant issue in the political ideology of pre-modern societies is the relationship in which those men exercising worldly domination stand in regard to the para-human power(s). transcendent or immanent, believed to be in control of the universe. For the ancient world, it is a commonplace that the Egyptian pharaoh was held to be a member of the divine body governing the cosmos, but only a few Mesopotamian kings, mostly belonging to the Sargonic, Ur III, and Isin dynasties, claimed this exalted rank for themselves. What precisely did it mean for a Sumerian or Babylonian monarch to assume divine status, and how did these individuals differ in their rule from the Mesopotamian kings who did not become gods?

Such questions have long been debated by Assyriologists and Egyptologists, as evidenced by Henri Frankfort's early synthesis, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago, 1948). The conference whose proceedings are published in this volume was convened in Chicago on February 23-24, 2007 in order to shed light on the problem from various angles. Aside from the editor's general introduction and Kathleen D. Morrison's response to the meeting as a whole ("When Gods Ruled: Comments on Divine Kingship"), eight of the contributions deal with kingship in Mesopotamia in the wider sense (including that of the Persian Achaemenids), and one each with rule in ancient Egypt, China, Central America (Mayas), Rome, and the twentieth-century kingdom of Akwapim (southeastern Ghana).

What emerges from the assembled data, both Mesopotamian and comparative, is that in the pre-scientific social formations considered here there is no absolute boundary between the world of humans and that of the gods, and that the monarch occupies the fuzzy transitional space between the two spheres. His role is to...