Sons of God - The Ideology of Assyrian Kingship
Prof. Simo Parpola
The impact of Mesopotamian religious thought on the evolution of other ancient religious and philosophical thought has never been seriously investigated. What follows are my initial forays into this uncharted territory. I suspect the influence has been far greater than anyone has yet suggested.
Take, for example, one small datum: There was a commandment to refrain from work and travel on every seventh day of each month (plus the 19th day). Whether this had any effect on the Israelite commandment to refrain from work and travel on the seventh day, I do not know. It may be simply coincidence. Or there may be some relationship between these prohibitions.
A more substantial matter is the Mesopotamian sense of the
king as the son of God. As we shall see, some of the similarities to later religious concepts are rather striking.
In the popular imagination
Assyrian kings have long been portrayed as despots of the worst possible kind, spending their time--when not engaging in war or other cruelties--in
their harems, immersed in bodily pleasures and revelries. Consider Eugène Delacroix's famous painting The Death of Sardanapalus: Here, an
atmosphere of depraved luxury is suggested in the disgusting portrait of this last great Assyrian king (late seventh century B.C.) as described in
ancient Greek histories.
The picture of Assyrian kingship that emerges from a study of the documents left by the Assyrians themselves, however,
is far different. To the Assyrians, a king immersed in revelries and cruelties would have been an abomination; their kingship was a sacred institution
rooted in heaven, and their king was a model of human perfection seen as a prerequisite for man's personal salvation.
The heavenly origin of
kingship is already attested in the earliest Mesopotamian cultures. In both Sumerian and Babylonian mythology, it is expressed allegorically with the
image of a tree planted upon earth by the mother goddess, Inanna/Ishtar. The sacred tree, usually represented in the form of a stylized palm tree
growing on a mountain, is the most common decorative motif in Assyrian royal iconography. It occurs in imperial architecture, on seals and weapons of
the ruling elite, on royal jewelry and elsewhere. The walls of the palace of king Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 B.C.) in Kalhu (modern Nimrud) were
covered with more than 400 representations of the sacred tree.