Mesopotamian Politics

Excerpts

Giorgio Buccellati
2024 When

Marco De Pietri – March 2024

Giorgio Buccellati

Buccellati 2024 When
“When on High the Heavens...”: Mesopotamian Religion and Spirituality with Reference to the Biblical World,
Cambridge: Routledge.

NOTE: cf. also the companion website Mes-Rel.

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Excerpts from Buccellati 2024 When

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Religion and Politics

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Religion and Politics	pp. 131-132 (section 16.2)	16.2 Religion and politics In this perspective, the definition of the interactive relationship with the absolute, namely religion, is an essential political act. The codified relationship with the absolute offer the social group a justification for the imponderables that condition it and a way to relate to them. The political nature of this state of affairs derives from the fact that there are strong ideological centralizations, through the role of the divinities and the importance of their temples. The political control of the social group through religious norms is the external expression of the tensional factors, and therefore also becomes a manifestation of the political order. Religion has a political value, whether or not it is exploited by “secular” power. The reverse is equally true. Religion, as a system to account for the absolute, seeks to explain the universal order in a way completely parallel to that with which secular politics seeks to organize social forces to arrive at a pragmatic and effective order in the visible world. The State therefore has a religious value at the ideological level, and not only at the practical level, of one form or another of caesaropapism. Not because the State proposes ways to relate directly to the absolute that conditions us (as religion does), but because it proposes a model of control that in itself wants to be absolute in explaining the real organization of the visible world. In other words, religion is politics because it offers mechanisms that serve to give integration to the social group, and politics is religion because it offers an effective model of world integration. In this sense, the modern state also has a religious value, and not only in those totalitarian regimes that intend to exclusively oppose strictly religious systems (exclusive because they want to exclude and overlap them). Religious value is also found in the secular State whic proposes a model of indifference with respect to the religious system proper: indifference means in this case that the inarticulate relationship with the absolute represented by the State takes the place of the articulate one represented by the religious system.

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Kingship and State in Mesopotamia

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Kingship and State in Mesopotamia	pp. 133-134 (section 16.5)	16.5 Kingship and State in Mesopotamia These general considerations will help us to put into perspective the religious, indeed, spiritual function of politics in Mesopotamia and in the Bible. We want to consider how political institutions have served to offer an implicit statement of the community’s perception of its relationship with the absolute. *Royalty^{Note 1} In Mesopotamia, royalty is not only the pinnacle of the political system, it is also, in fact, the only institution that incorporates the exercise of maximum power. There are different ways in which kingship manifests itself, different territorial areas in which it is exercised, and different terms to refer to the “king.” But the essence remains the same for more than two millennia. The notion proposed in the Sumerian king list, namely that kingship was dropped from the sky to be transmitted from city to city, from dynasty to dynasty, as a concrete object in its own right, is emblematic of the basic principle: power is summed up in a pinnacle that remains the same, whoever may be found there at one moment or another of historical development. It is the pinnacle that defines the pyramid and keeps it cohesive, i.e., it is the king who guarantees the integration of the social group. This awareness is expressed by the various kings, as in the prologue of the Hammurapi Code, where the king connects his enthronement to a specific divine decree. King divinization* The explicit divinization of the king is a phenomenon that rarely happens in Mesopotamia, and never plays a structural or institutional role, serving only as an extreme form of glorification. But it is certain that kingship as an institution is “divinized,” as the priesthood in its various forms never is. If a particular king is not divinized as an individual, we can say he is divinized as the holder of royal power, and only as long as power actually remains under his control. It is a way of defining the parameters of political legitimacy. *King as priest* Nor does the king ever exercise priestly functions in the technical sense of the word. But, again, we can say that he exercises such a function in a deeper way, which goes beyond technique and which is based on the spiritual dimension of his position. Although ritual formalization is rare (as in the sacred marriage), the role of a connective link between the community and the divine sphere remains central. It is in this sense, in a properly spiritual sense, that the king is recognized as, and indeed expected to be, an essential intermediary with the absolute. Just as in the prolog of the Hammurapi Code, so in the long series of royal inscriptions of all periods, the exercise of power in all its forms is explicitly linked to the world of the gods, and various epithets of a priestly nature are applied to the king. Strange as it may seem, we must recognize that the king had, from the point of view I have described, a priesthood that is not technical but spiritual. *The State* The State, understood as the concrete configuration of the social group in its political articulation, is also an entity that has come down from heaven as a fait accompli. In this case, it is the city that is spoken of, both in Enūma elīš, where the “creation” of the city precedes that of man, and in political texts such as the “code” of Hammurapi, where the city is presented as the epitome of the kingdom, in other words as the State, which is constituted even before the king’s call to govern. The State, therefore, seen in its ideological expression as the city, is the materialization of order, specifically connected with the divine sphere, and then connected with the king’s control.

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The differential impact of spirituality in politics

Topic	Page	Excerpt
The differential impact of spirituality in politics	pp. 136-137 (section 16.8)	16.8 The differential impact of spirituality in politics [...] As we shall see (see Section 19.3), both the city (the equivalent of the State) and kingship emerge as complete institutions that have their own reality independent of the individual. They are entities inserted as such in the ahistorical dimension of the primordial absolute and are therefore borrowed as such in the dynamics of social and political development. That Mesopotamia has in fact had an extremely animated institutional development in a pragmatic way is something else entirely. Religious ideation, instead, understood as the production of ideological symbols capable of explaining the institution in relation to the absolute, stops at the original conception. [...]

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Notes

Note 1: The headings in bolded italics have been added by the author of the present page. _{Back to text}

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