The history of kings

Democracy can’t compete with the history of kings

Hywel Williams

10 October 2007

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An archaeological site reveals the resilience of monarchy

But it is divine approval that lies behind all the symbolic actions: its sanction ensures that rebellion can be portrayed as sacrilegious as well as treasonous. The Divine Right of Kings may have been a novel bit of political theology in early modern Europe — the time when it developed as a hard-and-fast doctrine. But successful monarchs on the make and weaker ones fearful of a fall have invariably prayed in aid to divinities. Ancient Mesopotamia in its successive civilisations — from Sumerian and Akkadian right through to Babylonian — sets the pattern, since these were temple as well as palace societies. The maintenance of order in these domains revolved around agricultural surpluses: priests stood by the side of kings in determining who got what in that division of the harvests.

Europe’s tradition of ‘sacral kingship’ as both an idea and an institution harks back to the temple at Jerusalem in the mid-10th century bc with Solomon’s emergence as a king over Israel. Anointment by holy oil showed the charisma of a new royal ideology that had turned its back on Israel’s history as a mere federation of tribes. Unity at the centre was what mattered now — and it was the job of the royal cult to produce a national solidarity with the king playing a central role in the high feasts celebrated at the temple.

Democracy’s secularising ways can seem a very light brush compared to a once-dominant system: rule by aristocratic males who professed a religion and hunted wild animals for recreation, who waged war during the campaigning season and spent the rest of their time at court absorbed in intrigues centred around a central monarchical figure. This is where power lies in most human societies before about 1789. That dynastic order now seems exotic, secretive and ‘unconstitutional’, but the overwhelming majority of subjects seem to have thought of it as an entirely natural dispensation.