This book identifies and analyses, on the basis of recently discovered sources and original research, three story-patterns associated with human kingship in early Greek and ancient Near Eastern myth. The first, which I call the Myth of the Servant, is a well-attested but so far unrecognised story-pattern that was used to explain how an individual of non-royal lineage rose to power from obscure origins. As will be shown in Chapter 1, this myth is first documented in connection with the early Mesopotamian king Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the Old Akkadian dynasty in the third millennium bc. In later periods the story-pattern was applied to other rulers who seemingly emerged from nowhere and created influential new royal dynasties: these include king David of Israel and Judah (according to the Hebrew Bible), and Gyges of Lydia, Cyrus of Persia and Semiramis of Assyria (according to Greek historians).

Although kings are often central to the extant literary (and other textual) evidence from Mesopotamia, the wider Near East and the eastern Mediterranean, the texts themselves were usually authored by others, such as poets, priests, prophets or scholars. If mortal kings typically claimed to rule thanks to divine support, these latter characters similarly tended to base their authority on their ability to articulate and enact the divine will. Inevitably perhaps, the stage was set for narratives of conflict between kings and other intermediaries of the divine. This chapter shows that the ancient sources again exhibit a consistent pattern: it is always the king who initiates the conflict, often in a military context. The king is not necessarily impious, but shows casual disregard for the divine will, despite the information offered by a reliable intermediary. This is invariably depicted as an act of folly. The negative consequences soon become apparent, but they are usually borne primarily by the people whom the king was supposed to lead. The first attestations are found in Sumerian sources from early Mesopotamia. The other main bodies of evidence are the Hebrew Bible and the early Greek epics of Homer and Hesiod.

This chapter identifies a well-attested but so far unrecognised story-pattern that was used to explain how an individual of non-royal lineage rose to power from obscure origins: the Myth of the Servant. The myth is first documented in connection with the early Mesopotamian king Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the Old Akkadian dynasty in the third millennium BC. In later periods the story-pattern was applied to other rulers who seemingly emerged from nowhere and created influential new royal dynasties: these include king David of Israel and Judah (according to the Hebrew Bible), and Gyges of Lydia, Cyrus of Persia and Semiramis of Assyria (according to Greek historians). In some parts of the ancient Near East the Myth of the Servant was also used to explain the early history of divine kingship among the gods.

This chapter offers a new and original analysis of what I call the Myth of the Goddess and the Herdsman: here the fundamental claim is that the mortal king engaged in a sexual relationship with a powerful female deity (Inana or Ištar in Mesopotamia, Aphrodite or Venus in the Greco-Roman world). As shown here, this relationship is merely the central episode of a longer story-pattern. The myth in full begins with the preparations of the union and the sexual union itself, and continues with the male lover’s transgression and his divine punishment. The punishment leads to lamentation, which in turn paves the way for a conciliatory ending, which is again achieved by divine intervention. Here the sources include Mesopotamian cuneiform texts from the late third millennium BC onwards, a variety of evidence from the wider ancient Near East, and Greek poems on the mythical early rulers of Cyprus and Troy. The last adaptation – the union of the Trojan prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite, which produced the future Trojan leader Aeneas – was of special importance in the Greco-Roman world, as it was eventually claimed to be the mythical basis of Augustus’ right to rule as the first Roman emperor.