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Godsend Ruler: Religion and Political Domination in Prehistoric Aegean
God, on Whose Side?
Garrett G. Fagan (Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA)
Craige B. Champion
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Godsend Ruler: Religion and Political Domination in Prehistoric Aegean



Religion can be highly effective as a control mechanism due to its powerful social effect and inherent conservatism. The appropriation of religion by political hierarchies, given its strong emotive and socially binding force, which reaffirms group identity and sanctifies as territorial marker community rights on land and natural recourses, can effectively paralyze social resistance and secure obedience to the dominant hierarchy; by being highly impervious to change, religion preserves not only its traditional beliefs and rituals, but also the intertwined social structures which support them. This paper aims to study diagnostic cases of religion appropriation for political domination in Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece, outline their spatial distribution and temporal development, and trace patterns of variation and uniformity in order to reveal mechanisms employed by hierarchies and to conglomerate a complex social process on the basis of a plethora of diverse archaeological, anthropological, historical, and literary evidence, both quantitative and qualitative. The development in the architectural form and ritual use of cemeteries and sanctuaries reflects this social process, by revealing a growing pattern of formalization and spatial organization, proliferation and standardization of shrines and altars, gradual transfer of such shrines in palatial contexts or in close physical proximity, increasing power of palatial shrines and priesthood in economy and production, spatial and poleodomic organization of cemeteries, which along with their inherent social stratification become an image and organic extension of the living society (necropolis), escalation of ancestor veneration and cult tradition in cemeteries, combined with formalization and elaboration of funerary ritual. To contextualize this enormous energy and time expenditure, one must acknowledge in them a power mechanism and integrative force recognized and employed by those emerging elites. It so appears that at an early stage competing elite factions attempt to assert control and gain restrict access to both cemeteries and sanctuaries, by claiming a mediator role, a privileged physical and ideological connection to the ancestors and the gods; gradually, emerging central palatial authorities manipulate, exercise control over and finally appropriate both funerary ritual and religion, thus consolidating their power and legitimizing their political authority in an admirable symbiosis and interplay of the divine and politics.


R. Leon Fitts (Dickinson College, Carlisle, USA)

God, on Whose Side?



Simon Hornblower says that “great sanctuaries are likely to have been objects of political attention and even manipulation in the fifth century as well as the fourth.” There is good evidence for such activity, especially in the fourth century when Philip used the Delphic shrine as a springboard into central Greece and his takeover of Greece itself. Herodotus, on the other hand, shows the manipulation of the shrine was alive in the sixth century, but the evidence for influence of the shrine during the fifth century is slim mainly because of the silence of Thucydides. Still, one should suppose that the sanctuary was used by the superpowers of Athens and Sparta in their confrontation with each other. My paper examines some instances of manipulation of the Delphic oracles starting with the First Sacred War down to the peace of Nicias, focuses on the attempts made to garner political advantage from the shrine, especially by Athens and Sparta, and the means used – unilateral control, bribery, and indirect control of the Amphictyonic Council. My intent is to suggest that the Delphic oracle and the political machinations surrounding it, not only represent the deep reach of religion into matters of the state but the power of its spiritual influence which gave divine sanction to human authority.


Garrett G. Fagan (Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA)

“The Servant of Assur”: Cosmological and Imperial Order

in The Letter to Assur of Sargon II, King of Assyria (721-705 BC)



The Letter to Assur, found at the royal city of Assur and now in the Louvre in Paris, recounts the events of Sargon II’s Eighth Campaign (714 BC) in the area of modern-day Armenia. It had long been traditional for Assyrian kings to embark on annual campaigns of imperial expansion or reintegration and to record the course of those campaigns in the Royal Archives (the exact purpose of which remains unclear). The campaign reports in The Letter to Assur, uniquely formatted as a direct address to the chief Assyrian deity, reveal much about Assyrian imperial ideology and its relationship to the cosmological order ordained by the gods. The consistent claim of the letter is that the Assyrian empire represents the divine order on earth. From this proposition it follows that (a) Assyrian imperialism is the divinely ordained, natural state of things; (b) opponents and rebels are on the side of chaos against order; and (c) rebels, in particular, are vile oath-breakers, offenders against the gods. We shall examine each in turn. All of these attitudes is summed up in a striking passage (§153) which can be read as a sort of manifesto for Assyrian divinely-ordained imperialism. It is an idea that has persisted in imperial ideologies down to the present day, and can be found in echo in the Achaemenid king’s relationship with Ahura-Mazda; Thucydides’ presentation of Athenian arguments to the Melians; Virgil on rome’s destiny (the Prophecy of Jupiter); and the National Security Strategy of the USA adopted by George W. Bush.


Craige B. Champion (Syracuse University, USA)