Kingship in Asia and early America Titulo Basham, A. L. - Compilador/a o Editor/a; Autor(es) Lugar El Colegio de México Editorial/Editor 1981 Fecha Colección Aspectos culturales; Monarquía; Aspectos sociales; Gobierno; Budismo; Islam; Temas Hinduismo; Historia; Asia; América Latina; India; China; Japón; México; Libro Tipo de documento "http://biblioteca.clacso.org/Mexico/ces-colmex/20200911021041/kingship-in-Asia-and-early-America.pdf" URL Reconocimiento-No Comercial-Sin Derivadas CC BY-NC-ND Licencia http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.es Segui buscando en la Red de Bibliotecas Virtuales de CLACSO http://biblioteca.clacso.org Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO) Conselho Latino-americano de Ciências Sociais (CLACSO) Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) www.clacso.org XXX INTEllNATIONAL OONG.U:SS OF HUMAN SCIENCES IN ASIA AND NOR.TH AFR.ICA Kingship in Asia and Early America Editor A. L. Basham El C.olegio de Mexico Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-onCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by- ncnd/4.0/ Priam-a edici6n 1981 D.R.© 1981 EL COLEGIO DE MEXICO Camino al Ajuaco !O Mmco !O. D.F. lmprao y hecho en M&ico Printed and made in Medco ISBN 968-12--0107-8 Contents List of Participants 1 Preface 3 Introduction 5 Sacral and Not-so-Sacral Kingship in the Ancient Near East John van Seters 13 Kingship in Islam: a Historical Analysis S. A. A. Rizvi 29 Aspects of the Nature and Functions of Vedic Kingship · James A. Santucci 83 Ideas of Kingship in Hinduism and Buddhism A. L Basha111 115 The Socio-Economic Bases of "Oriental Despotism" in Early India R. S. Shar111a 133 Ancient Kingship in Mainland Southeast Asia M. C. S11h/Jtldr.idis Disk1'1 143 Some Aspects of Kingship in Ancient Java S. S11po1110 161 Ideologies and Traditions of Monarchy and Government in Imperial China Hok-lam Chan 179 Monarchy and Government: Traditions and Ideologies in Pre-Modern Japan ]oreph M. Kitagawa 217 Kingship in Ancient Mexico Pedro Carrarco 233 The Inka and Political Power in the Andes Franklin Peare, G. Y. 243 List of Participants A. L. Basham, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. Pedro Carrasco, Advanced Research Centre, National Institute of Anthropology and History, Mexico City, Mexico. Hok-Lam Chan, University of Washington, Seattle, United States. Subhadradis Diskul, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand. Joseph M. Kitagawa, University of Chicago, United States. Franklin Pease, Catholic University of Peru, Lima, Peru. S.A.A. Rizvi, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. James A. Santucci, California State University, Fullerton, United States. John van Seters, University of Toronto, Canada. R.S. Sharma, University of Delhi, Delhi, India. S. Supomo, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. Preface This volume has emerged from a seminar on the ideologies of tradi­ tional Asian and pre-Columbian American kingship held in August 1976 at the 30th International Congress of the Human Sciences in Asia and North Africa, in Mexico. With the exception of the paper contributed by Dr. Santucci (which was read at another session of the Congress), and my own brief notes on the ideologies of kingship in pre-Muslim India, all the papers are substantially as presented at the Congress, but they have been revised where necessary by their respec­ tive authors, in the light of the often vigorous discussions which took place at the seminar. It will be noted that in most cases the authors of each paper are members of the cultures concerned. I must admit that considerations of nationalism played a big pan in the decision to invite such scholars, for, though we were dealing not with contemporary ideas, but with ancient and traditional ones, the theme has some bearing on contemporary politics. Hence I feared that remarks made by foreign scholars in their papers might in some cases be taken as disparaging or politically loaded by others indigenous to the civilizations being discussed. There was probably no need to take this precaution, but as a result we have .a series of papers most of which are the work of spe­ cialists who have been born and bred in the cultures concerned, and this, I think, has given several of them an inward character, which otherwise they might have lacked. The only exceptions to the rule are the papers of Drs. van Seters and Santucci, both of which deal with kingship in long vanished civilizations, which by no stretch of the imagination can have any significant direct influence on contemporary affairs; and my own. The latter must be looked on as an addendum to that of Professor Sharma, who somewhat misinterpreted his brief­ ing, and presented a paper dealing rather with the structure of ancient Indian government than with its ideologies. This was understandable in view of the great pressure on his time, for he combines the headship of a large university department with a very responsible administrative 4 PREFACE post as Chairman of the Indian Historical Research Grants Committee. It is with his permission that I have added a few pages on Ancient Indian ideas of kingship. In editing these papers I have not been able to obtain complete uniformity in matters of bibliography and footnoting. This could have been _done, but, in view of the geographical distribution of the authors of the papers, and of the pressure on their time and my own, to insist on uniformity might have resulted in great delay in the appearance of this volume. I have only attempted to achieve unifor­ mity in respect of typographical convention and spelling. The O.E.D. has been chosen as the norm rather than Webster, simply because most of the contributors employed the British system in the first place. It remains for me to thank Professor de la Lama and the organizers of the 30th International Congress for making the symposium possible; those who contributed papers, and took pan in the discussion; and three members of the supponing staff of my depanment at the Aus­ tralian National University, (in alphabetical order) Miss Mary Hut­ chinson, Mrs. Ponia McCusker, and Mrs. Pat Z.eller, without whose help I could neither have organized the symposium nor have edited the papers. A.L.Basham Canberra, 1977 Introduction To introduce this series of papers is, in one sense, easy: they are all very valuable for the information they contain, and the reader who carefully works through them all will have acquired most valuable background knowledge of theories of government of the major civili­ zations of early Asia and America. To say this, however, is not enough. It was part of the purpose of the seminar to try to discover common ground between the ideas of one culture and those of another, and to find, if possible, some ideas held in common by all of them, including the cultures of the Aztecs and the Incas. At the seminar, however, the discussions tended to emphasize in particular the ideology then being considered rather than to compare two or more cultures, and the final meeting, when the theme was considered as a whole, did not result in any definite conclusions. This is partly the fault of the chairman, my­ self, who perhaps did not exert sufficient authority over the course of the discussion; but it was also a measure of the intrinsic interest taken in the individual papers, each of which stands in its own right as an authoritative survey of its subject. The earliest ideas of kingship discussed in the seminar were those of the Ancient Middle East, succinctly outlined by Dr. van Seters. In Egypt the king was divine with a clear and explicit divinity, though he was simultaneously human, while in Mesopotamia his divinity was even more qualified. Exceptional among the peoples of the region were the Hebrews, who seem at first to have managed without king­ ship ·at all; and later to have adopted that institution with much misgiving. This, at least, is the impression given by the Old Testament texts on the subject, which have come down to us after much later editing. Yet they did not exclude certain passages in the Psalms and elsewhere which show that, if the king was not divine, at least he was endowed with a divine charisma, obtained at his consecration, and that Yahweh, the only valid god, was believed to bestow magical powers upon the Messiah, "the Lord's Anointed"; it must be realized that every properly ordained Hebrew king was in this sense a Messiah. 5 6 INTRODUCTION Some of the ancient Hebrew ideas were inherited by the Arabs, and indeed in a sense the early Muslims repeated on a larger and more durable scale the experiences of the Hebrews nearly two millennia earlier, after their conquest of Palestine. Nomads and semi-nomads, they gained control of lands and peoples much more developed than they were~ and, for all their efforts at maintaining the purity of their original faith, they could not fail to absorb some of the ideas of their new subjects, who were much more sophisticated than themselves. Just as a series of prophets inveighed against the kings of Israel for compromising with the gentiles in both thought and practice, and recalled the freer days of the desert, so a series of Muslim divines attempted to bring back the faithful to the ways of the Four Righteous Caliphs. They were not, on the whole, successful, for, though Islam could not permit a fully developed doctrine of royal divinity, the Iranian concept for fa"· the divine radiance bestowed upon the righ­ teous and legitimate ruler, gave the caliph, the padshah and the sultan an almost superhuman status, despite the occasional protests of the stictly orthodox and of a few rationalists such as the great Ibn Khaldun.