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The King-God as shepherd of men

 Since the earliest written testimonies, kings have presented themselves as shepherds of men, and the difference in the hierarchy is literal. We have examples in the Gilgamesh, the hero is the shepherd of Uruk, in the Enuma Elish, in the myths of the shepherd King-God Dumuzi, in the introduction to the Code of Hammurabi, in the texts of Ashurnasirpal II, in the myths of Krishna, in the Bible in relation to David and in other myths from the Middle East to India in which the King-God legitimizes himself as a caring force for the group. But herding is nothing more than a more stable and evolved form of hunting, and the predatory descent of the shepherd over the herd weighs on this rhetoric of power. The narratives often combine the benefit that cattle derive from being cared for, their livelihood, with total dependence and submission to the will of the shepherd. In these myths, there are not even slave images as they would be understood in the modern world, but rather proclamations of difference of species that are put into practice in the organization of the city: on the one side the gods (or their representatives) and on the other, the “blackheads”, an Akkadian metaphor to designate common men. The first temple-cities of Mesopotamia are literally dairy farms, with stables next to the temples and the residences of the priests, responsible for milking the sacred cows with the same attitude with which the population of servants and slaves are exploited.

The rhetoric of pastoral power, as Michel Foucault called it, supposes the creation of myths that function as a technology of power, as protocolized primitive determinations that stabilize economic relations, legitimizing them in the figure of a King-God creator of the world and the city, who governs it as a benign figure for those who submit, and terrible for those who oppose his will, identified with the universal order. The city wall protects from the enemy and prevents the flight of the slave and the cattle. It is interesting to note that the first temple cities of the Middle East and Mesoamerica arose in closed habitats, in river and mountain valleys, from which it was difficult to escape.

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