Early Christianity, and the Pauline letters specifically, was concerned with questions of legality and its transcendence. In a process analogous to that described in the previous chapter, the flesh of Christ holds out the possibility of transcending the law itself, and remaking oneself and one’s community in the wake of the historical disruptions of the first century BC/AD. Communities throughout the empire, intrigued by the possibility of taking on new and different laws or, by contrast, freeing themselves from all laws, saw in the possibility of Christianity the opportunity for transformation. For Paul, real law is not concerned about materiality, but transcendence. There are important and underexplored commonalities between Paul’s interpretive moves and those of the sophists of the following chapter. The key body, however, is not the body of the orator, but the perfect body of Christ, which deserves to be imitated.

Attempts to register and control the populations of the east left a documentary record that was often extremely local. Provincial subjects proved astute readers and compilers of local documentation, which they rearranged in order to make claims of right. These claims can be mined for their underlying legal ideologies. Provincial subjects imagined law not as an abstract system, but as a running list of privileges and disabilities. Rights emerged from having the most correct or most persuasive hermeneutic for making sense of collections of documents in dialogue with officials, through the process of generating legal paperwork. Archives were not merely repositories of external facts about the world: they were collections of arguments that could be made. Law emerged from the collaborative process of claiming such rights.

Chapter V turns to the image and discusses first former art historical approaches in ancient Near Eastern studies to the narrative in the image. It then introduces W. Mitchell’s notion of text-image dialectic and Schriftbildlichkeit (pictorial notation). It makes a case for a semiotic approach informed by Gottfried Boehm’s notion of the deixis of the image to justify a narrative reading of the image in the process of reception. This narrative reading is informed by the interpictoriality of the image which is anchored in a stream of tradition as well as its intermediality with mythic narratives and ritual performance.

Chapter VI provides case studies for the conceptual metaphor of conflict myth in the image reaching from the fourth in the first millennium BCE. Its approach is informed by Aby Warburg’s emphasis on gesture language and its history of reception as developed in his Mnemosyne Atlas and by Erwin Panofsky’s approach to iconology to develop the concept of interpictoriality as a network of pictorial references or Bildgedächtnis (collective pictorial memory).

What Alberto Manguel claims for Talmudic and Islamic book culture can be extended to the history of reception of storytelling through text and image in Mesopotamia. In this book, storytelling, in general, and mythmaking, in particular, have been categorized as essential cognitive and cultural strategies of world-making to make sense of experience, to explain social and cosmic order, and, consequently, to structure knowledge in order to respond to future challenges and expectations. Thus, cognition and cultural learning merge in the process by which the ancient scholars, whom I regard as the primary agents behind the creation of texts and images receive, reactualize, and rework former material. Due to their orientational and expository nature, storytelling and mythmaking can claim their rightful place as systems of knowledge besides other systems of knowledge, including divination, magic, Listenwissenschaft, et cetera and should be considered on a par with logical reasoning. In other words, in its endeavor to create meaning, mythmaking is an epistemic and world-making endeavor. The diachronic approach in this book made it obvious that, despite its localized expression, the creation of a cultural repertoire of text and image revolving around the ruler was shared by the elites throughout Mesopotamia and contributed to their cultural identity, self-understanding, and self-representation. This repertoire was informed by core metaphors and conveyed in all media including myth, image, architecture, and ritual, with each medium creating its own narrative framework. It has also shown that the transfer of knowledge over centuries and millennia was not transmitted in a linear manner, but rather that scholarly communities shared and retained collective knowledge over generations, choosing and reviving particular tropes in specific historical situations and contexts.

Chapter IV discusses various Sumerian and Akkadian stories as examples for myth as a fundamental instrument of thought and its explanatory, orientational, and worldmaking functions, as well as a reflection upon forms of political governance.

Chapter VII explores the projection of myth into Neo-Assyrian palatial architecture and landscape. It argues for a choreographed appearance of the ruler which was governed by the architectural design intended to translate myth into royal epiphany.