The Myth of the Servant: A New Tale of Kingship from the Ancient Near East

Kingship is one of the best-documented aspects of the ancient Near East, simply because so many of our sources are connected to royal figures in one way or another. Monarchical rule was also a feature shared by most of the various cultures that together make up the ancient world, and we know that ancient kings were aware of each other, across space and time: they maintained diplomatic relations, read their predecessors’ inscriptions, and compared their own achievements to those of others. In my recent book, Three Myths of Kingship in Early Greece and the Ancient Near East: The Servant, the Lover, and the Fool, I have drawn on the abundance of primary sources in order to identify several recurring story-patterns that were used, again and again, to explain and legitimise certain important features of ancient kingship.

One of these story-patterns I have called the “Myth of the Servant.” At various times in ancient history, a new man arrived on the scene and founded a new ruling dynasty that profoundly shaped the history of their people. This new ruler had no connection to the existing royal family, and so the beginnings of the new dynasty disrupted the established order. In the ancient way of thinking, it was not enough simply to say that some newcomer suddenly turned up and seized power: there had to be a plausible backstory, an account of who this person was, and how he came to rule. Significant people needed significant stories.

This is where the mythical element becomes relevant: the central claim of the “Myth of the Servant,” I argue, is that the newcomer originally served as a servant of the existing king. This claim is embedded in a longer story-pattern, which in its fullest version extends all the way back to birth. To summarise in abstract terms: the future ruler is born in a situation of tension, and is separated from his natural parents; he is then rescued and adopted by a palace servant, and begins a career at court that eventually introduces him to the immediate entourage of the existing king; in the end, the new man takes the throne himself, typically with divine support. One notable feature is that the incumbent king (the future ruler’s master) is usually an invented figure, in the sense that we rarely possess independent historical evidence for his existence.

This mythical story-pattern probably originated in connection with Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the Old Akkadian empire (2316–2277 BC). While Sargon’s true origins are unknown to us, his birth and early life quickly became the subject of a myth that presented Sargon as an outsider of non-royal birth who, thanks to the support of the goddess Inana/Ištar, founded a new and powerful dynasty of his own. The main sources for this story are the Sumerian King List, a rather lacunose Old Babylonian Sumerian literary text known as Sargon and Ur-Zababa, and the highly condensed prologue to a later Akkadian text that scholars have called the Sargon Birth Legend. While some have argued that these various sources present fundamentally different narratives, a careful review of the evidence suggests otherwise: it is in fact far simpler, and certainly more economical, to read the various texts as partial reflections of a single underlying story-pattern. This alternative (and in my view superior) reading had been suggested by several scholars, but had not yet been worked out in detail.