by Faun Rice
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
419
IV’s transformation of the system of succession. Earlier, the children of a reign-
ing sultan had been sent off to cut their political teeth as rural governors; then, on
the sultan’s death, they were expected vie for the throne (often through outright
warfare), a drama which would end with the winner killing off his remaining
brothers. Under the new dispensation, the brothers remained alive, but confined
to a section of the Topkapi Palace in an extension of the harem called the kafes
(“cages”), in near-complete isolation (Necipoğlu 1991: 175, 178; Peirce 1993:
99–103;).39 Each would take the throne in turn until none were left and then
power would revert to the son of the first. This ensured that by the time most did
come to power, they were not only quite old, but also lacked any experience of
the world, and often were struggling with severe mental health issues caused by
decades of solitary confinement. Most reigns in this period were therefore short.
The most notorious, perhaps, of the period’s rulers, Ibrahim I (“the mad,” r.
1640–48), exercised absolute and arbitrary power inside the palace, at one point
ordering his entire harem be tied into weighted sacks and drowned; at the same
time, he knew almost nothing of life outside, and his interventions in public life
were largely whimsical. (At one point he is said to have ordered his officials to
locate the fattest woman in the empire, whom he ultimately made governor of
Aleppo.) Eventually he was deposed and a child was made sultan in his place.
During this period, day-to-day power in the palace was wielded above all by
royal women, the chief consort and queen mother, who were technically slaves.
Outside it was increasingly in the hands of an emerging bureaucracy. Occasion-
ally a relatively energetic sultan would “escape from the palace” to organize a
military campaigns or some other royal project. But this was considered a nota-
ble achievement in itself.
I could go on from here to describe the self-enclosing paradises created by
such walled-up kings, whether in Persia or in China, or the dynamics whereby
warrior elites would relegate existing kings to boxed-in ceremonial status (as the
Seljuks did to the later caliphs, or shoguns to the emperor of Japan). But space
does not permit. Suffice it to say the dialectic of divine and sacred never en-
tirely goes away. Even since the rise of republican forms of government in the
late eighteenth century, and displacement of sovereignty itself—that is, divin-
ity—entirely from living monarchs onto an even greater abstraction called “the
people, in practical terms, their defeat has always taken the same form.
39. The confined princes were above all forbidden to procreate, so once a set of brothers
were all dead, office passed to the eldest child of the first of them.
420
ON KINGS
When kings win: The war against the dead
Alexander, who was invincible on the battlefield, was completely helpless in his per-
sonal relationships. For he was ensnared by praise; and when he was called Zeus, he did
not think he was being mocked, but honored in his passion for the impossible and his
forgetfulness of nature.
Agatharchides of Cnidus
Let Alexander be a god if that’s what’s so important to him.
Damis the Spartan
Let him be the son of both Zeus and Poseidon at the same time if he wants for all
I care.
Demosthenes of Athens
What happens, then, when kings definitively win? When sovereign power is
not bottled up in a palace or other bounded utopia, but can operate relatively
untrammeled across a king’s dominions? It seems to me this introduces an en-
tirely new set of dilemmas, and that these dilemmas also take a fairly predictable
form.
It is one thing to take a palace garden, or even a palace, and turn it into a
tiny model of perfection, a paradise outside of time, process, and decay where
the fundamental dilemmas of the human condition are—at least momentar-
ily—resolved. It’s quite another to do this to a city or a kingdom. Few even try.
What’s more, a king’s power breaks out of such a diminutive paradise: that is,
the less the king’s power is contained in space, the more self-conscious he be-
comes about the fact that power is nonetheless contained in time, and, thus, the
more he confronts the contradictions of his own mortality.
In a medieval Hebrew version of the Romance of Alexander the Great, the
great conqueror faces this dilemma directly. Having subjugated the kingdoms
of the world, he proceeds to scour the earth in search of immortality. Finally,
winning his way into the Garden of Eden, he locates and is about to take a drink
from the Waters of (eternal) Life when he hears an unearthly voice:
“Wait! Before you drink of those waters, do you not want to know the conse-
quences?” Then Alexander looked up and saw a radiant being standing before
him, like the one at the gate of the Garden, and he knew it must be an angel. . . .
Alexander said simply, “Yes, please tell me.” Then the angel Raziel—for that was
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
421
who it was—said to Alexander: “Know, then, that whoever drinks these waters
will know eternal life, but he will never be able to leave this garden.” These words
greatly startled Alexander, for had the angel not stopped him he would already
have tasted of those waters and become a prisoner in paradise. (Cited in Ander-
son 2012: 97)
At this, Alexander realized that, given the choice, he preferred to be contained
in time than in space after all, and abandoned Eden forever.
Every tradition calibrates the basic quandaries of human existence slightly
differently: the relative importance and particular significance of dilemmas
surrounding work, sex, suffering, reproduction, or death. Still, there is none
in which human life is not seen to involve impossible dilemmas, and none in
which the reality of death is not at least prominent among them. It is a tragedy
of human existence that we conceive the world in timeless categories, but we are
not ourselves timeless. Kings tend to become a focus of such problems because
they are simultaneously a kind of Everyman, an exemplar of the human condi-
tion, but at the same time, beings which have at least the potential to transcend
that condition. As we’ve seen, even when kings lose, the most effective way of
controlling them is to force them to pretend that they are bodiless immortals.
One need only consult ancient fantasies about all-conquering heroes like Alex-
ander to see how much the dilemma continues to haunt them when they win.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is only the earliest and most famous: Gilgamesh, noto-
riously, having conquered everything he considered worth conquering, became
depressed contemplating the inevitability of death, and set off on a quest to se-
cure the herb of immortality in a far-off Land of Darkness. As most readers five
thousand years later will still know, he succeeded, only to carelessly lose it, and
immortality, to a serpent. At the end of the st
ory, Gilgamesh consoles himself
by gazing at the walls of Uruk, which he had built, and which will remain his
enduring testimony.
Variations of this story appear again and again. Wonder-tales accumulated
around great works of architecture, typically centering on monarchs who in one
way or another tried to cheat death.
Some of these monarchs were, obviously, more successful than others.
Among the most successful, in legend at least, was the Assyrian queen Semi-
ramis, whom Diodorus Siculus called the “most renowned woman of whom
we have any record” (2.3.4) and who, by Alexander’s time, was said to have
conquered nearly the entire known world (Herodotus 1.155, 1.184; Diodorus
422
ON KINGS
Siculus 2.3–20; Voltaire 1748; Gilmore 1887; W. R. Smith 1887; Sayce 1888;
Frazer 1911c: 349–52, 366–68; D. Levi 1944; Eilers 1971; Roux 2001; Dalley
1996, 2005; Kuhrt 2013). It’s worth dwelling on her story for a moment because
in the ancient world, for a time, she seems to have become a paradigm for the
greatest possible realization of human ambitions.
Scholars still argue about what historical figure, if any, the legendary Semir-
amis was based on. She appears to have originally been an amalgam of a number
of Mesopotamian queens, most prominent among them Sammuramat, wife of
the Assyrian King Shamshi-Adad V (823–811 bc), possibly Armenian in ori-
gin, who might have ruled as regent during her son’s minority.40 Scholars, need-
less to say, contest pretty much every detail, but it would seem Sammuramat
became the Mesopotamian prototype for any autonomous female ruler who led
military campaigns, patronized sages, and sponsored great works of architecture
and engineering (Dalley 1996: 531; 2005: 18–19; 2013b: 123–24). Her story
only seems to have really taken off under the Persian empire (Eilers 1971; Roux
1992), such that by the time Herodotus visited Babylon three centuries later,
Semiramis was remembered as the creator of its earthworks and other marvels.
Herodotus hints at, but does not spell out, more scandalous legends (W. R.
Smith 1887: 304). Two generations later, Ctesias, a Greek doctor living in the
Persian court, provides us with the details (Nichols 2008).
By the time of Ctesias’ account, the queen has become of semidivine ori-
gins, her mother cursed to turn into a fish, herself raised by doves. Above all,
though, her story seems to have become a patriarchal fantasy about the terri-
ble—if titillating—things that men in that epoch suspected women would get
up to if allowed to compete with them on equal footing (cf. Slater 1968; Asher-
Greve 2006).41 In many versions, Semiramis’ rise to power is literally a ritual
of inversion run amok. She is a beautiful courtesan, or maybe servant girl, who
tricks King Ninus into allowing her to be queen-for-a-day during a festival;
then quickly sounds out his disaffected generals and orders him locked up. In
40. Many even cite specific dates for her reign, 810–806 bc (e.g., D. Levi 1944: 423;
Eilers 1971: 33–38), but Kuhrt (2013) insists all this is presupposition based on her
later fame, since there is no direct evidence she was ever regent.
41. We only know Ctesias’ account from Diodorus and a few other later sources, but
the latter author seems to have cleaned out many of the more romantic, magical,
or scandalous elements. All these were later developed in the Greek “Romance of
Ninus and Semiramis” (D. Levi 1944; Dalley 2013a), which was very popular in the
Hellenistic and Roman periods.
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
423
others, she merely marries the infatuated king, impresses him with her military
acumen, and takes power when he dies,42 but either way, Semiramis sets out to
outdo her former husband’s achievements—no mean feat, as in the stories he’s
the original founder of the Assyrian empire. She sets off on a series of conquests
that carry her from Ethiopia to the gates of India, founding the cities of Baby-
lon (she builds its hanging gardens) and Ecbatana in the process, and becomes
responsible for virtually every impressive monument in western Asia whose au-
thor was otherwise unknown. Semiramis was also said to have shunned remar-
riage, preferring to take lovers from among the most handsome of her soldiers,
whom she would order killed when she grew bored of them; hence, by the time
Alexander’s armies were passing through Asia, any mysterious artificial hill was
referred to as a “mound of Semiramis” and assumed to contain the body of one
of her paramours. Smith (1887: 306–7) and Frazer (1911c: 372), for this reason,
felt Semiramis was in part just a secularization of the Mesopotamian goddess
of war and fertility Inanna/Ishtar/Astarte, whose annual lovers met a similarly
unhappy fate.43
Most spectacularly: Semiramis never died. Forewarned by the oracle of Am-
mon in Libya that someone close to her would betray her, but not to resist, when
she learned her son Ninyas was conspiring with court eunuchs to overthrow
her, she called him in, announced she was turning over the kingdom to him,
and simply vanished and became a god. (“Some, making a myth of it,” adds
Diodorus [2.19.20], “say that she turned into a dove.”) This is particularly im-
portant for this study because Semiramis appears to be the first monarch we
know of (the first I know of certainly) who was said not to have died but to have
disappeared this way—the paradigm for Nyikang, and dozens of other African
42. Diodorus’ version, in which she married a general and then eventually the king,
whom she impressed by her ingenious stratagems that allowed him to capture the
city of Bactra, seems to be an attempt to deromanticize the story. Berosus’ lost
history of Babylon (fr. 5–6) calls Semiramis daughter of a prostitute, or perhaps of
a holy recluse; Plutarch ( Moralia, 243c, 753e) and Pliny ( Natural History 6.35) both
make her a slave-girl in Ninus’ royal household; an otherwise unknown Athenaeus
whom Diodorus cites as the alternative version, like Aelian ( Varia Historia 7.1),
makes her a courtesan or prostitute herself. Wilder versions of her sexual exploits
seem to have been circulating as well: Pliny, for instance, has her, like the later
legend about Catherine the Great, arranging to have sex with a horse (8.15).
43. Gilgamesh himself, Frazer remarks, refused Inanna’s bed for just this reason (1911c:
317). On the other hand, insofar as he was divinized, he ended up a god of the dead,
which presumably would have been his fate as Tammuz-figure as well.
424
ON KINGS
founders of dynasties, for instance, who likewise vanish and become gods in the
face of hostility of kin or people.44
Alexander was quite self-conscious in seeing himself as trying to emulate,
and if possible outdo, the achievements of Cyrus, the founder of the Achaeme-
nid empire, but even more he saw Semiramis as his rival. His disastrous march
across the Gedrosian desert to India was meant to match one of her exploits,
and even at the end of his life, he is reported to have expressed frustration that,
unlike her, he had never conquered Ethio
pia (Arrian 6.24.3, 7.15.4; Stoneman
2008: 68, 129, 140–43). Like Semiramis, Alexander made himself a god on
the basis of a visit to the oracle of Ammon in Libya, to the bemused shrugs of
statesmen back in Greece; he also founded cities, raised monuments, and did all
the things a great conqueror was supposed to do. But he only truly defeated his
rival after death, when the Alexander Romance, a marvelous version of his life
story, was translated into dozens of languages and became perhaps the single
most popular nonreligious book of the next millennium, easily eclipsing the
fame of the competing Romance of Ninus and Semiramis. Almost instantly, Alex-
ander himself became the measure of the ultimate possibilities of human ambi-
tion, and his stories go even further than that of Semiramis, not only granting
him Ethiopia and India, but having him pursue mastery all human knowledge
and wisdom as well, attempting to attain heaven in a flying machine powered by
griffons, explore the bottom of the sea in a diving bell, even, by the Middle Ages,
finding his way to the Garden of Eden. At the same time, he outdid all prede-
cessors in fame not by what he achieved, but by what he didn’t: in the Romance,
his conquests become simply so many attempts to overcome mortality; he is
constantly trying to achieve eternal life or at least learn the hour of his death,
and in this he fails. Like Gilgamesh, he embarks on an impossible quest through
44. The obvious common feature is that having disappeared, none of these monarchs
have burial places. Semiramis is said to have built a famous monumental tomb for
her husband Ninus, but despite leaving tombs of her lovers across western Asia, and
endless cities, bridges, canals, towers, tunnels, and so forth, there is no evidence in
any of the sources of her having a tomb—except in one case, as a kind of joke:
Semiramis caused a great tomb to be prepared for herself, and on it this
inscription: “Whatsoever king finds himself in need of money may break into
this monument and take as much as he wishes.” Darius accordingly broke
into it, but found no money; he did, however, come upon another inscription
reading as follows: “If you were not a wicked man with an insatiate greed
for money, you would not be disturbing the places where the dead are laid.”
