Bound by Stories?! Narration as a Strategy of Royal Legitimation: An Introduction
Elisabeth Wagner-Durand
Julia Linke
Preface
Narration clearly represents a phenomenon of transcultural and transmedial significance. Therefore, storytelling can be perceived as some kind of anthropological constant comprehensible in most cultures, both modern and ancient. Thus, the question arises whether narratives, both visual and textual, may have been used to create and legitimate royal authority in the Ancient Near East. Ancient Near Eastern studies have been concerned with very different media. Some of them may have potentially served to legitimize kingship, and others most certainly have been extensively used to do so. Thus, while their political usage seems beyond doubt, we focus on one specific potential quality of both media; namely, whether these media took the form of narratives to fulfill specific aims of royal legitimation. Cultural scholars may agree on the fact that narratives constitute fundamental components in the production, negotiation, communication, and storage of social meaning and identity, but we still have to explore whether this also applies to the specific matter of royal legitimation.
Approaching Royal Narratives and their Legitimating Qualities
Without question, narration and narrative are buzzwords that have received scholarly attention from a wide range of disciplines both in recent years and during the last decades. For this reason, one has to ensure that any new research on narratives becomes not lart pour lart but a productive venture revealing that the subjects of narration and narrative are matters of immediate interest also in Ancient Near Eastern Studies. While issues of legitimation somehow need no further justification for scholarly research, narratives require a little more illustrative attention. Momentarily neglecting the difference between factual and fictional storytelling and the subject of literariness, one can superficially state that narratives have a strong impact on the memorability of the events told. This is often enhanced by special aspects of certain narratives such as the inherent suspense and the transmitted emotions: These qualities implant the story told and the implicit meta-narrative (for example the kings legitimation or validation) in the recipients minds. The narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan wrote that narratives are about several issues that may not be included in the definition but are still valid. These include, among others, issues of problem solving, conflict, human experience, and the temporality of existence. It is therefore no wonder that stories have certain effects on the recipients, effects that might explain if and which stories may have been created and used for different purposes, in our case, for the purpose of royal legitimation.
Interested in the matters of royal legitimating narratives, we planned the workshop Tales of Royalty: Notions of Kingship in Visual and Textual Narration in the Ancient Near East, held during the 61th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale in Bern (and Geneva). In this vein, we first intended to link two different spheres: the world of visual culture(s) and the institution of kingship, each represented by one of the two organizers whose fields of research seemed to be wide apart but nevertheless were closely connected. Therefore, the workshop aimed to merge two broad and known scholarly issues: royal legitimation strategies that have been the focus of research since the first days of Ancient Near Eastern studies and visual narration which once again has become increasingly important in our research. Very quickly, however, we realized that written narratives complemented the visual ones, encouraging a holistic approach to the subject matter, which led to both the title and the final form the workshop took (see below). This joint venture had both the risk of turning into a huge failure and at the same time the worthwhile opportunity to create new and productive insights. By linking our interests into one combined subject related to a specific but broad set of questions, we hope to have started a lively discussion concerning the matter of royal narratives. By combining those issues with one common set of questions and by searching for corresponding aspects, we trust that new insights may be revealed.
While we, as the organizers of the workshop, aimed to open new debates and horizons for ourselves and for all active as well as passive participants, the matter of royal narratives in the Ancient Near East, especially in Mesopotamia, has been dealt with by several scholars. Potential written narratives have formed the subject of many philological studies on Ancient Near Eastern textual sources, mainly of so-called literature, including debated text types such as epics and myths. In many cases, however, the question of what exactly constitutes a narrative seems not to be discussed (as is the case with many, but not all studies on Mesopotamian visual culture). Similarly, Mesopotamian kingship and royal legitimation have been extensively discussed in the scholarly literature, including sociological treatments on power, authority, and leadership. Many of these scholarly treatments of kingship and written narratives will be cited in the papers presented here. Thus, we refrain from any further mention of them here. Visual narratives of the Ancient Near East and beyond were the subject of a conference held in 1955, whose contributions have been published in the American Journal of Archaeology, forming one of the bases of contributions to the matter of visual storytelling. Looking at early visual representations of authorities, Zainab Bahrani connected the performative power of the Uruk Vase with narration and representation. Claudia Suters approach to the same object also led us to the potential beginning of both institutionalized rulership and of visual narratives, depending on which defining aspects are applied to them. Davide Nadali has drawn upon the question of narratives in the visual world of Mesopotamia several times. Recently, he argued that the rise of visual narratives is connected to the emergence or consolidation of royal powers in the third millennium BCE. Fittingly, Irene J. Winter has also considered the narrative qualities and representational powers of the so-called Stela of the Vultures, one of the best known but surely also of the most complicated objects of third millennium BCE visual culture. Much attention has been drawn to Neo-Assyrian art in respect to narrative visual culture and kingship. Needless to say, Julian E. Reades thorough considerations of Neo-Assyrian orthostat reliefs always considered both narrative qualities of visual culture and kingship. Therefore, he also more or less explicitly touched upon the question of royal legitimation. Winter has also greatly contributed to the field of Neo-Assyrian visual narratives and royal legitimation, giving written and visual sources equal weight. Chikako Watanabe has conducted very thorough ananylses of narrative modes in royal Assyrian Art. At the very same conference during which Nadali gave his talk on the power of narratives, one of the organizers of this workshop took a deeper look at potential narratives of the Neo-Assyrian royal hunts, taking into consideration their impact on royal legitimation.
