"The institution of kingship, as Henri Frankfort, its brilliant modern interpreter, pointed out, is one of the early innovations to which we can assign an approximate date, place, and agent, fairly closely in Egypt, a little more loosely in Mesopotamia. The historic effort, as recorded on two famous Egyptian palettes, begins at the point where the paleolithic hunting chief, the first among equals, passes over into the powerful king, who takes to his own person all the powers and prerogatives of the community.
"As to the origin of the king's unconditional supremacy and his special technical facilities, there is no room for doubt: it was hunting that cultivated the initiative, the self-confidence, the ruthlessness that kings must exercise to achieve and retain command; and it was the hunter's weapons that backed up his commands, whether rational or irrational, with the ultimate authority of armed force: above all, the readiness to kill.
"The original connection between kingship and hunting has remained visible all through recorded history: from the stelae upon which both Egyptian and Assyrian kings boast of their prowess as lion-hunters, to the preservation of vast hunting forests as the inviolable domains of kings in our own epoch. Benno Landsberger notes that with kings in the Assyrian empire hunting and fighting were virtually interchangeable occupations. The unscrupulous use of the weapons of the hunt to control the political and economic activities of whole communities was one of the effective inventions of kingship. Out of that a whole series of subsidiary mechanical inventions eventually came.
"In the mixture of the paleolithic and neolithic cultures, there was doubtless an interchange of psychological and social aptitudes as well, and up to a point this may have been a common advantage. From the paleolithic hunter the neolithic cultivator may have gained those qualities of imagination that the dull, thrifty, sober round of farming did not awaken. So far no weapons of the hunt, still less weapons of warfare, have been unearthed in the earliest neolithic villages, though they became common enough in the Iron Age; and this lack of weapons may account for the primitive peasant's docility and for his easy surrender and virtual enslavement: for he had neither the tested courage nor the necessary weapons, nor yet the means of mobilizing in large numbers for fighting back.
"But at the same time the punctual, prudent, methodical life of the agricultural community gave the incipient rulers some share in the neolithic habits of persistence and orderly drill, which the hunter's mode of life, with its fitful spurts of energy and uncertain rewards, did not encourage. Both sets of aptitudes were needed for the advance of civilization. Without the assurance of a surplus yield from agriculture, kings could not have built cities, maintained a priesthood, an army, and a bureaucracy--or waged war. That margin was never too large, for in ancient times war was frequently suspended by common consent till the harvests were gathered.
"But sheer force could not by itself have produced the prodigious concentration of human energy, the constructive transformation of the habitat, the massive expressions in art and ceremonial, that actually took place. That demanded the cooperation, or at least the awed submission and passive consent, of the entire community.
"The agency that effected this change, the institution of divine kingship, was the product of a coalition between the tribute-exacting hunting chieftain and the keepers of an important religious shrine. Without that combination, without that sanction, without that luminous elevation, the claims that the new rulers made to unconditional obedience to their king's superior will, could not have been established: it took extra, supernatural authority, derived from a god or a group of gods, to make kingship prevail throughout a large society. Arms and armed men, specialists in homicide, were essential; but force alone was not enough."
...
"Under the protective symbol of his god, housed in a massive temple, the king, who likewise served as high priest, exercised powers that no hunting chief would have dared to claim merely as the leader of his band. By assimilation, the town, once a mere enlargement of the village, became a sacred place, a divine 'transformer,' so to say, where the deadly high-tension currents of godhead were stepped down for human use.
"This fusion of sacred and temporal power released an immense explosion of latent energy, as in a nuclear reaction. At the same time it created a new institutional form, for which there is no evidence in the simple neolithic village or the paleolithic cave: an enclave of power, dominated by an elite who were supported in grandiose style by tribute and taxes forcibly drawn from the community.
"The efficacy of kingship, all through history, rests precisely on this alliance between the hunter's predatory prowess and gift of command, on one hand, and priestly access to astronomical lore and divine guidance. In simpler societies these offices were long represented separately in a war chief and a peace chief. In both cases the magical attributes of kingship were grounded on a special measure of functional efficacy--a readiness by the priesthood's observation of natural phenomena, along with the ability to interpret signs, collect information, and ensure the execution of commands. The power of life and death over the whole community was arrogated by the king, or imputed to him. This mode of ensuring cooperation over a wider area than was ever ordered before contrasts with the petty ways of the farming village, whose ordinary custom is carried on by mutual understanding and consent, guided by custom, not by command."
...
"The earlier chieftains and their followers, well-armed, contemptuous of bodily injury or hardship, dissociated from the laborious routines of cultivators and herdsmen, and disinclined to systematic work, were probably already using these proto-military traits to exercise power and draw tribute, in food or women, from their intimidated, compliant, unarmed village neighbors. The weapon that established this new rule of force was not (pace Childe!) the Bronze Age war chariot, still many years away, but a far more primitive weapon, the mace. Such a club, with a heavy head of stone, which was useful for killing a wounded animal with a single blow on the skull, must have proved equally efficient in doing the same job at close quarters with frightened, weaponless peasants, or with the captured chief and warriors from a rival band, who appear as cowering captives on surviving palettes and stelae. Witness the final act of Marduk's battle with the primeval goddess Tiamat: "With his unsparing mace he crushed her skull."
"Should we be surprised, then, to find that the period of political unification of the Upper and Lower Nile Valley, which marks the beginnings of kingship in Egypt, coincides with mass graves in which are found an unusual quantity of cracked skulls? The significance of this weapon, particularly the time and place of its appearance, has been curiously overlooked. In the Sixth Millennium of Hacilar, James Mellaart notes, the economy showed a great decline in hunting and an absence of hunting weapons; but significantly the mace and sling survived. Thus it is no accident that the mace, in only a slightly sublimated form, the scepter, has remained the symbol of royal authority and unchallengeable power throughout the ages. When British Parliament is in session, a gigantic specimen lies on the Speaker's table." (pp. 169-172)
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