The history of kings

Democracy can’t compete with the history of kings

Hywel Williams

13 October 2007

An archaeological site reveals the resilience of monarchy

It has long been known that the Akkadian king Naram-Sin had a palace here in the late 23rd century bc. Tell Brak lies in a fertile basin, and its logistics meant that the town commanded the routes that led to and from the Jazirah desert. Max Mallowan’s team in the 1930s uncovered the site’s significance as it evolved in the centuries immediately before Naram-Sin’s reign. Archaeologists returned in force 30 years ago, and the work recently done by the Cambridge team led by Augusta McMahon push the settlement’s date of origin back to the late 5th millennium bc. Localised production of ceramics and objects made of obsidian glass — probably imported from Anatolia — show that Tell Brak was an international commercial centre even at this astonishingly early period.

But it is the seals stamped on the drinking cups that catch the historian’s eye as they emerge from the earth, because they delineate a lion caught in a net — a symbol of royalty wherever it is found in the ancient Middle East. Here, therefore, were kings. Tell Brak’s discoveries mean that we now have to look to the north of those classic southern Mesopotamian sites when searching for the roots of urban sophistication. Historians will also have to revise by up to a millennium the earlier dates given for the emergence of these stratified societies and hierarchies of power. Those lion seals are a powerful reminder of the deep roots of kingship, an institution that has a longer continuous history than that of any other system of power.

With kings go priests. The idea of a power that is sacred — along with that of a god or gods who bestow blessing and legitimacy on the successful ruler — is basic to kingship in all its forms. There are, of course, other features that recur: the projection of monarchical authority through acts of self-publicity and building programmes, examples of which range from the tombs of pharaohs and the mausoleums of Roman emperors through to the Versailles of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great’s Sans Souci.

Patronage also has to be distributed in the form of lands and jobs to key supporters. William the Conqueror changed the pattern of English kingship by ensuring that the nobility held their lands as — essentially — tenants of the crown. Napoleon Bonaparte’s career showed how kingship could be revived for a post-revolutionary age, and his institution of the Légion d’honneur exemplified his belief that ‘men are led by baubles’.

Kingship also needs to win foreign battles and suppress internal mutinies. It then celebrates its triumphs in rituals, processions and festivals whose supposedly antique details are often feigned — as in the case of the English Order of the Garter and Peter the Great’s invented Order of St Andrew.