Carole Raddato from Frankfurt, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In the previous post, I argued that Mesopotamian literature of the late second millennium BCE shows signs of an “inward turn”. Characters gradually become more than just pawns: they begin to reflect, doubt, and speak in ways that reveal a rich inner life. This development has been framed as part of a shift in human self-consciousness. Julian Jaynes famously pushed this idea to its extreme, arguing that humans only started developing self-consciousness by the late second millennium BCE.
The fact that, in Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions from the first millennium BCE, kings continuously boast, emphasize their own achievements, and present themselves as decisive actors, seems to confirm this hypothesis. At times, Neo-Assyrian kings sound almost modern. It is tempting to see this as the political counterpart to the literary inward turn: the emergence of something like an “ego” and a growing awareness of the self as an autonomous agent.
And yet, that interpretation is too simple. What changes in the first millennium BCE is not the sudden birth of the self, but the way agency is expressed and recorded.
Continue reading “When kings found their voice”