Sacred kingship

Principal schools of interpretation

The phenomenon of sacred kingship was known and described in ancient times by various travelers, including Aristotle in the 4th century bc and the 1st-century-bc Greek geographers and historians Strabo and Diodorus Siculus. The study of sacred kingship, however, was introduced when the British anthropologist Sir James Frazer published The Golden Bough (1890–1915). Taking his comprehensive material from ethnological reports and studies, Frazer concentrated on the preliminary stage. With the discovery of texts in cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, a new stage of research began. Called Pan-Babylonism by some scholars, the theories based on the results of these discoveries placed the god-kingdom of the ancient Middle East in the foreground.

Building on the thesis of Pan-Babylonism that a homogeneous Middle Eastern culture existed and on the theories of cult as a ritual drama, the so-called British and Scandinavian cult-historical schools maintained that the king, as the personified god, played the main role in the overall cultural pattern. The English branch of this school (the “myth and ritual school”) concentrated on anthropological and folklore studies. The Scandinavian branch (the “Uppsala school”) concentrated on Semitic philological, cultural, and history-of-religions ... (200 of 6,269 words)