Beate Pongratz-Leisten 2015 Ideology
Pongratz- Leisten 2015 Ideology
Religion and Ideology in Assyria,
(Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records 6),
Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter
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| Table of Contents |
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| General topic(s) of the book |
Addressing the relationship between religion and ideology, and drawing on a range of literary, ritual, and visual sources, this book reconstructs the cultural discourse of Assyria from the third through the first millennium BC. Ideology is delineated here as a subdiscourse of religion rather than as an independent category, anchoring it firmly within the religious world view. Tracing Assur's cultural interaction with the south on the one hand, and with the Syro-Anatolian horizon on the other, this volume articulates a "northern" cultural discourse that, even while interacting with southern Mesopotamian tradition, managed to maintain its own identity. It also follows the development of tropes and iconic images from the first city state of Uruk and their mouvance between myth, image, and royal inscription, historiography and myth, and myth and ritual, suggesting that, with the help of scholars, key royal figures were responsible for introducing new directions for the ideological discourse and for promoting new forms of historiography. |
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Excerpts from Pongratz- Leisten 2015 Ideology
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The “Divinity” of the King
| The "Divinity" of the King | pp. 225-228 | From an ideological perspective, statements asserting that kingship was divine or non-divine in Mesopotamia offer little insight into the institution as it was understood by the ancients. In Mesopotamia the office of kingship was considered to be of divine origin and the human king was regarded as its recipient. The divinization of kings remained exceptional throughout Mesopotamian history. (...) Instead, ideological efforts were directed toward the development of cultural strategies that sacralized the office of kingship by means of particular tropes that associated the ruler with the divine world. Since the institution of kingship demanded uninterrupted continuity, the king was required to perform a range of roles. As is clear from texts, rituals, and visual media, the king was the supreme administrator responsible to his patron deity or to the supreme god of the pantheon; he was the foremost high priest in the cult; he was a hunter and warrior defending not only his controlled territory but also ideally the cosmos against chaos; he was the judge and shepherd of his people; and he was the builder of the temples and the caretaker of the cult. Even though such roles could also be performed by divinities, who then served as models for their human counterparts, in Mesopotamia the king continued to be regarded as a human being throughout his lifetime. Assyrian royal discourse integrated these roles into a logical, interdependent system in which the successful accomplishment of one role reinforced achievements in the other roles and vice versa. |
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Kingship and religion
| Kingship and religion | pp. 15-16 | Narratives of power and ritual served to anchor kingship in the mythical past and were essential strategies for sacralizing kingship. Because ritual and narratives of power were informed by and made use of myth and Weltanschauung, they adapted perpetually to changing political landscapes. Kingship in turn functioned both as the stimulus for the production of knowledge and cosmologies, as well as their crystallized expression. As such, considering myth, ritual, and kingship together is crucial to understanding the social efficacy of myth. (...) Political agency, too, cannot be explained exclusively as the product of social function or individual motivations, but is to be understood as the outcome of a certain weltanschauung, which in antiquity was often expressed in mythic patterns of explanation, interpretation and orientation. (...) The assumption here is that cosmogonies and myths at large not only create their own versions of the world – versions that change depending on context or text genre – but that they also have a strong impact on the political action of elites and on their ideological discourse. Conversely, while the Weltanschauung expressed in myth can inform political action, ideological innovation tends to follow rather than precede expansionist ambitions and new conquests. |
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Oracle collections and prophetic historiography
| Oracle collections and prophetic historiography | p. 359 | By means of the divine voice, the oracle collections concerned with legitimizing irregular succession gain the same divinely determined character as the Tablet of Destinies: they impose the concept of cosmic order articulated by the gods while transcending a particular historical event and using it to establish a new paradigm of succession. The oracle collections can be seen as a first step in the literary development towards prophetic historiography. As text categories, both the oracle collection and the (...) fictive dialogue that grew out of the textualization of prophecy were not part of the common literary repertoire. Although the oracle collection and the fictive dialogue were linked intertextually to other existing text categories, they emerged in historical situations of crisis and were exceptional in their form, content, and function. The fictive dialogue and the oracle collection both drew on the familiar structures and content of oracles in order to transpose and actualize the textual repertoire in a new literary framework, creating a message that does not address the king in a specific historical situation but is directed instead at posterity. By means of this new compositional framework, such texts compel the audience to engage in a dynamic and new reception of customary strategies of discourse. |
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Polytheism
| Polytheism | pp. 405-406 | As is clear from the Sumero-Babylonian case, the supra-regional pantheon developed from an amorphous mass of divinities into an integrated whole and was structured after socially familiar patterns such as the family, the royal court and its retinue, and incipient bureaucracy to form a coherent system of action. Polytheism reflects this kind of coherent system of action (Handlungssystem) in which every divinity contributes according to their skill-set to guarantee the functioning of the cosmic order; this system is in continuous flux, reflecting changing historical conditions. In the summodeism of the god lists or hymns of the first millennium BCE, the accumulation of various roles, functions, and qualities in one deity marks the developing consolidation of divine power in one divine agency. |
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State rituals
| State Rituals | pp. 390-391 | Ceremonial public performance of rituals figures as one of the central devices used to manifest divine support for the king’s authority. (...) To the uninformed reader, prescriptions for ritual performance can appear to be little more than instructions for the preparation of sumptuous offerings and the movement of ritual participants between various localities. Cultic commentaries, however, explain how rituals reiterate a sequence of action that combines hunting, warfare, cosmic battle, and the renewal of the king’s status as ruler of the universe in a continuum of confrontation with the forces of chaos, which are defeated and brought under Assyrian control. (...) The ideological implications of these Neo-Assyrian state rituals reflect the ancient world’s perspective on kingship, in which the king’s function as guarantor of civic and cosmic order is central. (...) Myth and ritual serve as explanatory patterns for the developing ideological framework, which not only asserts a utopian vision of the king mastering any potential disruptive forces but also conveys a notion of cohesion and consent among all the peoples of the empire. Myth and ritual were a key part of cultural discourse and were as important as pragmatic action in the consolidation and stabilization of Assyrian power and control, both in the imperial heartland and in the provinces. Myth and ritual were powerful means for visualizing and negotiating the asymmetrical power relationships represented by the monarchical system, and, as is apparent in the correspondence between the king and his scholars, they were carefully orchestrated to reinforce the king’s historical and cosmic role. |
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The Takultu-Ritual and syncretism in Assyria
| The Takultu-Ritual and syncretism in Assyria | pp. 404-405 | Although the genre of the god lists did not motivate the takultu’s sequence of topographical entries, the geographical mapping of Aššur’s empire in the takultu-ritual has a theological underpinning of a different kind. All takultu text variants begin by listing the divinities of the Assyrian cities Aššur, Nineveh, Nimrud, and Arbela, effectively defining the heartland of Assyria proper with Aššur at its very center. The particular theological expression of these texts cannot, however, be considered purely pragmatic. The names of the patron deities of these cities and some other deities are juxtaposed with Aššur, as in Aššur-Ištar, Aššur-Adad, Aššur-Tiara, Aššur-Lahmus, Aššur-Lahmus, Aššur-Conqueror, and Aššur-Šakkan-Tišpak. Assyria’s heartland is thus expressed theologically, and the patron deities and other city deities of the region are represented as extensions of the chief god Aššur. Jan Assmann coined the term hyphenation for this type of divinity in the context of Egyptian theology, which must be understood as a tool of systematic description, as there was no such thing as hyphenation in writing in either Egypt or in Mesopotamia. (...) As a theological strategy, the juxtaposition of divine names does not imply the same sort of identification as it does in the case of the translatio Graeca. Instead, the second divine element defines a quality or particular manifestation of the divinity. (...) Excluding the case of Aššur-Enlil, however, hyphenation does not signify that Aššur assumes the qualities of other deities. On the contrary, the theological intention in such cases is to define juxtaposed divinities as extensions of Aššur’s agency and thereby to concretize and broaden his scope of action. |
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The Hurrians in Urkeš
| The Hurrians in Urkeš | pp. 43-45 | Discoveries regarding the early urban culture of the Hurrians in Urkeš – situated at the foothills of the Tur-'Abdin – point to the existence of yet another cultural horizon, namely that of the Hurrians. Recent excavations in Urkeš suggest that Hurrian culture co-existed with Sumerian culture while retaining its distinctiveness as a northern urban tradition. These excavations also correct the idea that there was a period of ruralization in northern Syria during the second half of the third millennium, as the monumental temple terrace in Urkeš can be safely dated to the Uruk period and has much in common with the temple terrace in Tell Huera. During the Akkad period at the latest, the “Khabur triangle was already dotted with Hurrian towns (...) and the process of state formation was well under way, while further north, the mineral-rich region of eastern Turkey and southern Armenia (the “Upper Lands”), whence the Hurrians presumably came, was politically more advanced still.” By the Ur III period the Hurrian presence extended from the Zagros Mountains through to Tur-'Abdin, and from Subartu towards Ebla. This presence had a major impact on political and cultural life in the polities of Upper Mesopotamia. (...) Hurrian divinities served as carriers of a Hurrian identity, but were also adopted and adapted by Hittite and Assyrian cults. In other words, while any cultural practice can in theory be the product of acculturation, the fact that it is associated with a particular ethnic identity presupposes the existence of such an identity at some point in history. In our particular case, there is a clearly discernible notion of a distinctly Hurrian tradition within the Mesopotamian Weltanschauung. |