A List That Argues a Case

The Sumerian King List opens with a single sweeping theological claim: kingship was not invented by human beings but sent down from heaven by the gods, landing first at the city of Eridu before passing in turn to a sequence of other cities. What follows is a chronicle of dynasties and individual kings, several of the earliest credited with implausibly enormous reign lengths running into the tens of thousands of years, a detail modern historians read as unmistakable evidence that the list is doing theological and political work rather than recording sober history.

Central to that work is the list's insistence, against the plain archaeological and textual evidence of Sumerian history, that only one city held kingship at any given moment, with authority passing cleanly from one to the next rather than existing simultaneously in rival city-states as it demonstrably did. Nicole Brisch's collected essays on Mesopotamian divine kingship treat this fiction as the list's central purpose: whichever city compiled or updated a given copy of the list could use it to assert that its own current ruler stood in an unbroken, heaven-sanctioned line of succession, this religion's Doctrine "Divine Kingship in Mesopotamia" made into a specific, usable historical narrative.