Human/snake hybrids played a significant role in the Athenian imagination: the snake’s connections with the earth expressed the Athenian claim to autochthony. This claim was complicated. For some aristocratic gene, autochthony marked them as superior to more recent arrivals, but the foundational myth of Athens, involving Hephaistos’ attempted rape of Athena, was tinged with incest and pollution, indicating some ambivalence towards autochthony. Traditions of snake-bodied kings reflected a conception of the past that was conceptually both near and far from the present. The hybridity of the snake-figured ancestor connected them to a deep past but also bridged the gap that separated the present and connected past from the plupast. This was a particular concern in the sixth century, as new notions of Athenian identity were taking shape. Bluebeard, the famous pedimental sculpture from the Archaic Akropolis, embodies this. Bluebeard can be identified as the Tritopatores, ancestral deities of the Athenians. These hybrids signify the continuous irruption of the deep past into the current world, a condition that produced a creative tension between order and chaos.

Chapter 8 looks at Samuel in the theological context of the rest of the Scriptures: the Former Prophets or Deuteronomistic History, Chronicles, Psalms, Proverbs, Qohelet, and the New Testament.

By the second quarter of the fourteenth century, England had developed many attributes of a ‘constitutional monarchy’: one that would later expand and contract, in cycles, across the British Isles. This constitutional monarchy has been subject to many minor recalibrations; more major recalibrations have occurred between 1640 and 1690, and also between 1820 and 1870. To focus on the function and form of this hereditary institution of governance, it can be seen operating in accordance to rules and conventions within three separate if overlapping spheres: that is, the parliamentary, the personal and conciliar, and the judicial.

Sixteenth-century Spain was at the vanguard of European collegiate bureaucratic rule and imperial governance. This chapter argues that although in the 1490s to 1540s council ministers’ operations were considerably patrimonialist, determined largely by each member’s family interests, by the 1540s to 1590s the Council became substantially more impartial. This occurred in large part due to the influence of women. Vassals’ attempts to shape ministers’ decisions via female connections prompted the council’s fundamental 1542 and 1571 guidelines. Subsequently, Madrid’s anxieties about women’s sway, and surfeits of Indies commodities, stirred misogynistic treatises, royal scrutiny, and an increasingly explicit masculine ministerial ethos. More concretely, monarchs and ministers feared that some of their colleagues and subalterns would become the playthings of court women, who themselves had connections with vassals seeking their cases’ resolution. The actions of indigenous artisans here were particularly notable, as subjects regaled female courtiers with their exquisite goldwork. The resulting backlash against powerful women ensured that gobierno petitioning did not become the domain of the powerful few in the 1500s, and the fiction of the council as mere instruments for the monarchs persisted strongly throughout the second half of the century.

In the mirror literature, power and sovereignty are identified with the king’s person. The king’s conduct established a model, which his subjects would follow; consequently, the ruler’s actions and behaviour determined the nature of the polity. The king’s cultivation of virtue is, in consequence, a pragmatic as well as a moral imperative. The mirror-writers insist on the importance of the king’s self-discipline as a prerequisite for his governing other people; if he is unable to govern himself, he will be incapable of governing anyone else. The three extracts in this section describe the virtuous and effective king. From different perspectives, they treat some of the ethical and philosophical problems of human nature; in particular, they discuss how to strengthen, acquire and practise virtues and how to overcome and eradicate vices. The texts in this section are drawn from Yūsuf Khāṣṣ Ḥājib, Kutadgu bilig; al-Māwardī, Tashīl al-naẓar wa-taʿjīl al-ẓafar; and Kaykāʾūs, Qābūsnāmeh.

The formulas show us property transactions among laypeople that are fundamentally similar to those between laypeople and ecclesiastical institutions that we see in the extant charters. Laypeople sold or gave property to each other, or exchanged it with each other, and they used documents to do it. However, the formulas broaden our view of the sorts of transactions laypeople engaged in and who engaged in them. For example, different kinds of property changed hands: not simply arable but also vineyards, plots of land within cities, and even townhouses. People used property as security for loans. Laypeople also arranged to hold property as benefices, or as so-called precarial grants, not only from churches/monasteries or kings but also from each other. One person used a benefice arrangement with a king to pass property to a chosen heir, in much the same way as others did with monasteries. The evidence in the formulas for these sorts of arrangements suggests that the property arrangements between lay families and ecclesiastical institutions or kings that dominate the charter record reflect only part of a larger culture, in which a variety of people in the Carolingian world used property to create and maintain ties with each other.

With his ‘Solomonic Connection’, David Firth observes the man Solomon as he appears in Kings and Chronicles. Solomon is ‘paradigmatic’ for understanding wisdom in both of these books and yet he is not treated identically therein. Kings and Chronicles offer different portraits of the exceedingly wise king, whether that be his foundational role for wisdom or his problematic relationship with it. Matters of the temple, Solomon’s behaviour, torah, and the very conception of wisdom itself all have a place in biblical presentations of Solomon. Firth looks closely at 1 Kings 1–11 and 2 Chronicles 1–9 with a literary and theological reading that does not let one account determine the other or allow the Solomonic portraits in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes to have all of the attention.

The long series for the Polity P-index, 1800–2016, confirms equivalence. The great majority of traditional systems were based on three pillars: (i) a king from a royal house, (ii) a feudal aristocracy, and (iii) a national Church. The Grand Transition undermines two of these pillars: The Agricultural Transition reduces the agricultural sector dramatically. The Religious Transition substantially reduces religiosity and the economic power of the Church. Without the two pillars, the political system must change, and in addition, development creates a large middle class, which is the main recipient of the large increase in human capital. The consequence is very likely to be democracy. This is the strong but fuzzy relation behind the transition curve. The chapter also analyzes the spells of constant systems and explains why political systems consolidate into status quo equilibria that need triggering events to be broken.

Too little scholarly attention has been paid to the paradox that those from the southern kingdom of Judah wrote, collected, and edited a foundational narrative not of Judah but of Israel, the ethnonym more closely associated with the northern kingdom even within the biblical narratives. This chapter argues that, rather than staking their claim to be the sole heirs to the heritage of the covenant with YHWH, the Judahite biblical editors constructed a biblical narrative that emphasizes that Judah is only one portion of a larger Israel that is presently—from the perspective of the editors and their implied audience—incomplete and awaiting reunion and restoration. By constructing an Israel of the past and rhetorically situating the reader in exile, the editors of the Primary History (Genesis–2 Kings) and 1–2 Chronicles establish a perspective of restoration eschatology in which an idealized biblical Israel (of course under the leadership of Judah) does not presently exist, having lost its status due to covenantal disobedience and disunity, but remains a social and theological aspiration.

Chapter 6 offers summary reflections on the conclusions and contributions of the present work, including its findings for the study of the royal palms, the study of Syro-Palestinian inscriptions, Hebrew Bible theology, and the history of Israelite religion. In addition to proposing a new analytic for royal psalms (i.e. psalms of defeat), the book adds depth and specificity to previous scholarship on the theology of the royal psalms. It draws in sharper silhouette the animating commitment of royal psalms: Yhwh’s loyalty to his one individual client king. The book also calls attention to the non-narrative and lyric qualities of inscriptions, and it emphasizes the rhetorical centrality of their closing curse sections. For the study of Hebrew Bible theology, the present work holds up the important and distinctive theological offer of royal psalms. Historically, Levantine memorial inscriptions reflect an earlier engagement with Neo-Assyrian royal ideology and its monuments than scholars have argued heretofore, and a deeper indigenization.

Outside the Indus borderlands, the expansion of agriculture and settled society occurring hand in hand with population growth led to a new medieval dispensation that had little continuity with the prehistoric and ancient past. These combined processes occurred relatively late in comparison with developments in other major world regions such as the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia-Persia and are here traced region by region. Once they did take off, they showed greater potential than almost anywhere else in the world. The chapter goes on to show how in the early medieval period the expansion of agriculture and settled society began to give rise to a fragmented landscape of monarchies of varying dimensions and importance in the plains of all great river systems of India (South and Southeast Asia). This more vertical and hierarchical political order emerging in the zones of nucleated agricultural settlement of early medieval India superseded the thinly spread, mostly ritual sovereignty of the ancient empires. Typically, it was based on a condominium of Hindu kings and the Brahman priesthood and thrived in the context of a newly arising medieval Hinduism and caste order characteristic of settled society.

Together, the three biblical books Judges, Samuel, and Kings tell the larger part of the story of Israel and Judah as more-or-less independent nations on their own land. Their principal focus is on “rule,” good rule and bad rule: mostly royal rule (by kings), but also “rule” by judges and deliverers, and even by prophets. David is the key human ruler. God too “rules” in these books, but as “judge” rather than as “king.” Together with the book of Joshua, they constitute the sub-set of the Hebrew Bible called Former Prophets and the start of the historical books in an English Bible.

Chapter 2 sets to exemplify the range of meanings of lordship, one of the most important ideas that structured how people in Anglo-Saxon society thought about their world . Lordship provided a vocabulary of power: the king is ‘lord’ of all free men,. The administration of justice and maintaining social order depended very largely on individuals being ‘vouched for’ by lords who were legally bound to speak on their behalf . Lordship was idealised as a personal relationship as well as an institutional one, and poeticised in the figure of Beowulf, surrounded by his faithful troop of men. Many inland peasants were highly exploited by their land-hlafordas, the lords of the estates on which they lived and ealdormen had authority over small regions, but political authority was not yet inherent in the ownership of land: in that sense, Anglo-Saxon England was not a ‘feudal’ society. Lordship embedded hierarchy in a much closer and more personal connection through the relationship known as mannrӕdenn, ‘manrent’, or commendation.