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THE DIVINITY of the MYCENAEAN KING 1 in a Brief but Important

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THE DIVINITY of the MYCENAEAN KING 1 in a Brief but Important THE DIVINITY OF THE MYCENAEAN KING 1 by PETER W ALCOT In a brief but important paper published in I95I Marinatos argues that the divine ancestry of the legendary kings of Crete and Greece implies that their subjects regarded these monarchs as being more than ordinary mortals 2. Unfortunately, the Greek scholar is somewhat vague in his terminology, and one is left wondering exactly what he means when, for example, he claims that 'many and perhaps all Minoan-Mycenaean kings received heroic honour and worship' (p. I32). Is any special significance to be atta~hed to the word , heroic " and does the inclusion of this adjective signify that the Minoan-My­ cenaean king had to be content with something less extravagant than full di­ vine honours? It is crucial, furthermore, that a distinction be drawn between a society in which a king is worshipped as a god during his own lifetime and one whose ruler must wait until after his death before he is deified. As Mari­ natos, having made the claim quoted above, goes on to refer to the temple­ tomb at Knossos, are we to understand that the worship of the Minoan-My­ cenaean king was delayed until after he had died? The use of Egyptian ma­ terial elsewhere in the article certainly suggests that Marinatos thinks of the king as being worshipped as a god throughout the period of his life and not only following his death. Marinatos relies in the main on the evidence offered by the Homeric poems and Greek mythology. Only a couple of years later the decipherment of Linear B provided a new source of evidence, since the tablets revealed the existence in Mycenaean society of the wanax, to whom a temenas was allot- 1 An early version of this article was read at a colloquium of the University of Wales classics departments held in May, 1965. I gratefully acknowledge the comments made by my colleagues and by a guest, E. L. BENNETT, on that occasion. I also thank T. B. L. WEBSTER for helpful suggestions. 2 S. N. MARINATos, Studies presented to David M. Robinson, I, St. Louis, Miss., 195 1 , pp. 126-34· . 54 Peter Walcot ted. The character of the wanax has been investigated by Palmer, who first called this official a hereditary' priest-king', but soon substituted the term , god-king' 3. Most recently Palmer has described the wanax as a sacral king, affirming that ' a sacral king stood at the head of Pylian society closely linked with a goddess Potnia' 4. Palmer also believes it likely that wanax was the title of the Young God, whom, he states, the king would have represented in cult (p. 92). Presumably by 'represent' Palmer means that the wanax dressed up as and pl?-yed the part of the Young God in ritual, but I should feel happier if this term had not been used, at least not without it having been defined, for the more cautious Guthrie, who can see no conclusive evi­ dence either in the Linear B tablets or from excavation that the wanax was deified before his death, prefers to make the wanax the earthly representative of god 5. It is my belief that the Linear B tablets, the Homeric poems, ar­ chaeology, and Greek mythology all strongly suggest that the Mycenaean king was thought to be a living god, and it is in this sense that I would call the wanax a sacral king. In this article I propose to follow the lead of Mari­ natos and to consider just a part of the total evidence, that offered by Greek mythology, and, even more narrowly, that offered by one myth, the story of the conception of the hero Heracles. A study of the origin and the deve­ lopment of this myth has convinced me of two things, first that the Myce­ naean king did in fact rank as a god in his own lifetime, and secondly that such a concept of monarchy was adopted by the Mycenaean Greeks from the royal ideology of contemporary Egypt. That the Mycenaeans were heavily influenced by Egyptian culture may, I think, be called communis opinio today, whether one believes with Marinatos that those responsible for the Shaft Grave Circle A culture at Mycenae were Greek mercenaries who fought on the Egyptian side against the Hyksos, or, like others, that they were Hyksos themselves, who, having been expelled from Egypt, acquired a new kingdom in the Argolid shortly after 1600 B. C.6. The pharaoh of Egypt is the classic example of a sacral king: 'from the earliest historic times', according to Fairman, 'the dominant element in the Egyptian conception of kingship was that the king was a god - not merely godlike, but very god' '. The divine origin of the pharaoh could be 3 L. R. PALMER, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1954, pp. 35-37, and Achaeans and Indo-Europeans, Oxford, 1955, pp. 9-10. 4 The Interpretation of Mycenaean Greek Texts, Oxford, 1963, pp. 83 ff. o W. K. C. GUTHRIE, Bull. of Inst. of Class. Studies, VI, 1959, p. 42. I In addition to the article by MARINATOS already cited, see this scholar's con­ tribution to Festschrift Bernhard Schweitzer, Stuttgart, 1954, pp. 11-18, and, for the alternative theory, F. H. STUBBINGS, The Rise of Mycenaean Civilization, Cam. Anc. Hist. fasc. XVIII, 1963, pp. II-I4. 7 H. W. FAIRMAN in S. H. HOOKE (ed.), Myth, Ritual, and Kingship, Oxford, 1958, p. 75· The divinity of the Mycenaean King 55 stressed in a number of ways, and one of these' devices was the fiction of a theogamy in which the high-god, disguising himself as the reigning king, visits the queen and sleeps with her so that the successor to the throne is the offspring of a divine father and a mortal mother. Such a tradition is known from a series of pictures which tells the story of the divinely inspired concep­ tion of two of the pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty, Hatshepsut (1503-1482 B. C.) and Amenophis III (1417-1379 B. C.), the pictures decorating temples at Deir el-Bahri and Luxor respectively 8. The revealing picture for us in both series is the fourth, which at Deir el-Bahri shows the god Amun sitting opposite Queen Ahmose, the wife of Thutmose 1. An inscription which accom­ panies the picture is more informative than the scene itself: He made his form like that of this her husband, the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Thutmose 1. He found her as she slept in the innermost part of her palace. She awoke at the fragrance of the god, she smiled at the arrival of his ma­ jesty. He went to her immediately, he was inflamed with love for her, he gave his heart to her, he allowed her to see him in his divine form, when he had come before her, so that she rejoiced at the sight of his perfection; his love, it passed into her body. Divine fragrance flooded the palace, and all his odours were as those from Punt 9. It would appear from this inscription that fragrance was as much a token of divinity among the Egyptians as it was among the Greeks 10. Much more striking, however, is the parallel between the story of ·the conception of Hatshepsut and that of the conception of Herac1es: according to both tra­ ditions, the king of the gods disguises himself as the husband of a mortal woman so that he may enjoy her favours. Indeed the parallel is noted by Marinatos, whose comments, however, need considerable expansion. Thus Marinatos remarks, 'In Egypt of the time of the Theban New Kingdom, which is the time at which the Minoan-Mycenaeans became acquainted with Egypt, the pharaoh was considered a god in actuality and not merely in title. That is, it was believed that on certain nights Ammon would come in person to the queen in the form of her husband. Thus the new pharaoh was considered a real son of Ammon' (pp. 130-31). Later he adds, 'We may now note that Zeus does not visit beautiful women of any social standing, but, in absolute 8 The tradition has now been discussed by H. BRUNNER, Die Geburt des Gottko­ nigs, Aegyptologische Abhandlungen X, Wiesbaden, 1964, which includes illustrations of the Luxor birth scenes. The reliefs from Deir el-Bahri are described and illustrated by E. NAVILLE, The Temple of Deir el Bahari, London, Part Il, 1897, pp. 12-18 and plates 46-55, and Part Ill, 1898, pp. 1-9 and plates 56-64. Cf. also Hdt., I, 182. I J. H. BREASTED, Ancient Records of Egypt, Il, Chicago, 1906, p . 80, and BRUN­ NER, op. cit., pp. 42-43. 10 See the references collected by T. W. ALLEN, W . R. HALLIDAY, and E. E. S1- KES, The Homeric Hymns, Oxford", 1936, in their note on verse 277 of the Hymn to Demeter. Peter Walcot preference, only the daughters of kings and princes; and this is a very cha­ racteristic detail that will help us understand the original significance of his legendary relations. Sometimes he assumes the form of an animal or bird. Here we may be dealing with the Minoan-Mycenaean idea of the divine epi­ phany especially when we find the God assuming the form of a bird, as was the case in the story of Leda. In the case of Danae, gold, an inanimate ar­ ticle, assumes the important role. In the case of Alcmene the Theban-Egyp­ tian form of the myth is preserved in its original form, because in that case Zeus assumes the form of the absent Amphitryon ' (p.
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