The constitution of any state, whether written or unwritten, is the set of political, governmental and legal structures and shared values within which the business of everyday politics and governance operate. In fourteenth-century England there occurred the first two depositions in post-Conquest English history, which were precipitated by ‘unconstitutional’ behaviour by the monarchs in question and were effected by ‘unconstitutional’ legal devices on the part of the community of the realm. It was a century of cataclysmic demographic transformation brought about by the Black Death, of almost constant warfare with Scotland and France and of spectacular governmental growth and legal change. It is therefore ironic that, when English constitutional history was at its height, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fourteenth century, parliamentary developments apart, was regarded as a sorry backwater. It was useful only to reflect on how a wrong turning had been taken. ‘We pass’, Bishop Stubbs lamented, ‘from an age of heroism to the age of chivalry, from a century ennobled by devotion and self-sacrifice to one in which the gloss of superficial refinement fails to hide the reality of heartless selfishness and moral degradation’.1

One of the most common tenets of royal and messianic ideologies is the notion that the king ruled by divine favor. This ideology was variously signaled, very often by way of omens, dream visions, as well as other predictive mechanisms, epithets, and even the direct intervention of the gods. Chapter 1 explores the way that this ideology takes shape in non-Jewish kingship treatises as well as various early Jewish texts, focusing especially on messianic figures which serve as archetypes for Revelation’s Christ, including King David and the Danielic and Enochic Son of Man.

We then explore Revelation’s appropriation of this ideology, including especially the preponderance of messianic titles as well as the investiture scene in Revelation 5, where the Lamb’s reception of the scroll from the right hand of God signals divine favor and his right to rule on God’s behalf. These strategies for designating Jesus as God’s chosen vicegerent are viewed in light of similar tropes in other early Christian texts.

One of the most common tenets of royal and messianic ideologies is the notion that the king ruled by divine favor. This ideology was variously signaled, very often by way of omens, dream visions, as well as other predictive mechanisms, epithets, and even the direct intervention of the gods. Chapter 1 explores the way that this ideology takes shape in non-Jewish kingship treatises as well as various early Jewish texts, focusing especially on messianic figures which serve as archetypes for Revelation’s Christ, including King David and the Danielic and Enochic Son of Man.

We then explore Revelation’s appropriation of this ideology, including especially the preponderance of messianic titles as well as the investiture scene in Revelation 5, where the Lamb’s reception of the scroll from the right hand of God signals divine favor and his right to rule on God’s behalf. These strategies for designating Jesus as God’s chosen vicegerent are viewed in light of similar tropes in other early Christian texts.

The eighth and final chapter examines the larger effects of textualization and vernacularization. The combination of the new technology of writing with the social choice of the vernacular permitted ideas about custom to circulate beyond their traditional local community ambit. Previously rooted laws and customs grew legs, and customary legal ideas could be transmitted though the circulation of texts and shared outside their local setting. In fact, this is when we start seeing the term ‘common law’ appear in French texts, a term scholars associate in this period with either royal law in England or with Roman and canon law as law that was common to Europe. This French ‘common law’ has been hotly debated. This chapter contributes to this debate by using the coutumiers to show how a French ‘common law,’ in the sense of a pool of common customary legal knowledge, was developing in France. This, in turn, implies more similarity between the legal cultures of France and England in this period than previously thought.

The fourth chapter discusses the question of why now – why did customary law become the subject of vigorous written output at this particular thirteenth-century moment? The answer lies in the politics of customary law or, more specifically, the changes in both society and legal culture that created new zones of competition between secular and ecclesiastical courts. Competition between the temporal and spiritual jurisdictions was, of course, not new. The investiture controversy that began in the eleventh century, based in the conflict over the right of appointment of church officials, showed this to be a key issue of the high medieval period. The nature of competition manifested in the coutumiers was a little different. The coutumiers aimed to theorize, regularize, and professionalize the secular courts in the face of ecclesiastical courts, which had already gone through the same process and offered a competing forum at a time when boundaries were still being defined.

The thirteenth-century coutumiers capture a moment of intellectual ebullience. They were part of the formative moments of the lay courts and the theorization of ‘law in practice’ and in this sense the coutumiers were the linchpin of French legal thinking until the Revolution – and beyond in some French colonies. They created something powerful in the French legal imagination, so powerful that their use only increased with time and eventually became official law when the kings demanded coutumiers to be written for all the regions of France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This was all due to the ingenuity and intellectual creativity of the thirteenth-century lay jurists who borrowed, constructed, and effectively created a field of knowledge known as ‘customary law’.

When a Siamese King is officially crowned, he normally pledges his first royal command known as ‘Phra Phathom Borom Ratcha Ong-kan’. Although the royal command is mainly given for a ceremonial purposes, to some extent it indicates the status of kingship, the interrelation between kingship and law, the relationship between state, ownership and individuals, and the evolution of the state and political system. From around 2005, Thailand's politics has seen considerable conflict, and ‘Phra Phathom Borom Ratcha Ong-kan’ has broadly been cited to justify the status and righteousness of Thai monarchy. However, there has been little academic attention to the symbolic meanings and historical development of this first royal command. Moreover, most studies on kingship tend to focus on the ‘Dhammaraja doctrine’, which underpins the royal command but often neglect its historical layers and dynamic contexts. This chapter will examine the historical development, significance, and relevance of the concept ‘Phra Phathom Borom Ratcha Ong-kan’. The chapter will start by exploring the origin and importance of coronation ceremony and the first royal command. This will be followed by discussion of the development of the first royal command from the Ayutthaya to Rattanakosin kingdoms, mainly from the founder of Bangkok to the ninth reign of the Chakri Dynasty. Some critical analysis of the adjustments of words and phrases in the royal commands throughout history with regard to kingship, legal concepts, and the relation between state, ownership and individuals, particularly from the age of westernisation and reformation from the reigns of King Mongkut onwards, will also be provided. In the final part, it will critique controversies and contemporary context of the first royal command.

This chapter documents how Thailand’s practice of Sacred Buddhist Kingship builds on the Lèse-majesté Law, with the aim of providing a first analysis of how the dual process of secularization of blasphemy and sacralization of royalty via lèse-majesté throughout Thai modern history worked towards the King’s consolidation of power. In the first part, it will sketch a brief overview of the historical evolution of the Thai lèse-majesté law including its pre-modern antecedents, before turning to an analysis of the law of lèse-majesté as defined by judges and other members of the legal profession in Thailand. In the second part, the chapter turns to a thorough examination of key case-studies from the early 21st century, discussing the judicial procedures of exception implemented to punish and absolve lèse-majesté offenders.

The Egyptian and Mesopotamian speculative worlds are explored through their extant literature and assessed as scholarship, speculation, or philosophy. Though metaphysically and epistemologically complex, the lack of a speculative tradition with prescribed philosophy helps to explain why Assyriologists and Egyptologists often put Israel in league with the Greeks rather than the ANE world.

This chapter looks at the history of prostration in Thailand. The practice appears to have been adopted from the Angkorean Empire of the Khmers and was used at the Kingdom of Ayutthaya. It examines the modes of etiquette that were required in royal audiences for both Thais and foreign visitors. The chapter argues that by the nineteenth century Europeans regarded such practices as slavish and 'uncivilized'. This led, in 1873, to the young new king, Chulalongkorn, issuing a famous edict abolishing the custom of prostration and replacing it with European modes of paying respect such as bowing. But while in public functions involving Europeans the new modes of paying respect were observed, privately the custom of prostration before one’s superiors continued with little change.

This chapter examines the role of honor and shame in defining the warrior nobility that dominated the valleys of the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers in the early Eastern Zhou (770 - ca. 500 BCE). In this society honor reflected one’s hereditary place in the hierarchy of nobility, and also one’s heroism or success in battle. Shame was primarily a matter of failing to exhibit such heroism. Such honor was entirely masculine, and its two aspects were frequently in conflict, as ascribed status was established by seniority, while the heroism was often a hallmark of youth. This personal honor gained through heroism, which often figured in overthrowing a ruler or destroying a state, is our earliest example of constituting a public order separate from the formal political realm, and how such alternate honor helped to transform the social order.

Chapter four investigates Hittite conceptions of human nature. I argue that the Hittites imagined the human to have mimicked the deities on multiple levels. In the context of regular humanity, Hittites believed that both humans and deities possessed a body and soul(s). Whereas the human soul inhabited the human body, deities’ souls could inhabit any number of cult objects. Because the nature of the human soul was the same as that of a deity, it enjoyed a share in the divine state even in its natural condition. Like their neighbours, the Hittites understood the body to have come from the material of the earth. However, the Hittites imagined it as a particular type of metal-rich soil. Furthermore, they envisioned the soul as having had a liquid constitution. For this reason, they thought that they could actually drink the souls of humans and deities during different rituals. In the present life, royal figures could experience temporary moments of deification and empowerment. This occurred during ritual meals, when the monarch would contact the gods by drinking them into his or her body and participate in the divine, at least for a few moments.

Chapter three examines Mesopotamian conceptions of human nature. I argue that Mesopotamians viewed the human as a composite nondivine-divine space. Having been created from slain deities, the physical body participated in the divine nature. For some Mesopotamians, participation in the divine state was not wholly positive. The aspect of the deities that influenced them to rebel in heaven in fact formed part of the body’s constitution. Thus humanity’s propensity to disrupt the ordered cosmos stemmed from its share in the divine nature. The human was also conceived as a microcosm of the temple. As a microcosm of the cosmos, the temple was originally created to be the meeting point between divine and nondivine. Likewise, the deities created the human self as a physical space in which they could install themselves. The human was therefore a physical embodiment of the divine on a general level, just like the temple, and like the cosmos before that. Divine embodiment in a human context was clearest in ideas surrounding the royal self. The king participated in the divine nature to the point that, like true deities, he could install himself within multiple bodies at the same time.

Although the inscriptions contain bountiful self-representations of royal performances, personas, and encounters, they by no means present an exegesis on the political system as such. To build a view of five centuries and more of societal success we must look beyond these individual expressions to the way that they synergise with other sources, revealing patterns that can only be appreciated in the assemblage. This chapter therefore moves to draw together the different themes examined in Part II so as to offer a synthetic interpretation of Classic Maya political culture, both as it was constituted in the specific unit and the interactive whole.

Rhetorical education – specifically, the advent of the progymnasmata, or preliminary rhetorical exercises – taught students how to be Greek, and it appears to have been the root of many Hellenistic innovations in both art and literature. The wealthy and elite backgrounds of some Greek artists enabled them to be well educated, and their intellectualism aided their adult pursuits in oratory, teaching, and scholarship, not to mention art. Kings and courtiers, too, received Greek rhetorical educations, which allowed them to appreciate the rhetorically informed art in the courts. The courts also played a role in Hellenistic artistic production by drawing Greek artists around the ancient Mediterranean. The result of all this seems to be a standardization of Greek art that is analogous to a linguistic koine.

When the modern spectator tries to work out the imagery on the Archelaos Relief (Fig. 3.1), she quickly realizes that it thwarts a straightforward interpretation. Consisting of a lower interior scene surmounted by an upper mountainous landscape, the Archelaos Relief produces a constructed space that looks quite different from most ancient representations of the real world. The relief’s directed composition, moreover, draws the spectator’s eye up and down through its many levels, zigzag or boustrophedon fashion. And, what is more, the relief explicitly announces its rhetorical technique. For not only does it name an artist, Archelaos of Priene, it also glosses the figures in its bottom scene: personifications of abstract concepts.

The Telephos Frieze (Fig. 2.1) asks a lot of its spectators. Today, the modern viewer must use the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin as a stand-in for the frieze’s original architectural context, the second-century bce Great Altar at Pergamon (Figs. 2.2–2.5). Thinking away the gaps of missing sculpture, and employing the museum’s multilingual handouts, she must figure out the correct order of the frieze’s panels before she can appreciate its narrative. In antiquity, the task of viewing was of course much easier – the frieze was complete and contextualized – but it was far from unchallenging. For centuries, Greek spectators had been accustomed to viewing single moments of action in architectural sculpture. But here, they instead were asked to journey through both time and space in order to follow the life story of one hero, Telephos.

Today Hellenistic art is celebrated for its innovation. To get a sense of how it differs from the Greek art of previous eras, we only need to compare two well-known artworks that are separated by centuries but united in medium: the Classical frieze from the Parthenon in Athens (Fig. 1.1) and the Hellenistic Telephos Frieze from the Great Altar at Pergamon (Fig. 1.2).

The modern spectator’s first contact with Sosos’s now lost Unswept Room mosaic whets her appetite. Many handbooks illustrate it with a detail of a mosaic in the Vatican’s collections (Pl. I). Decontextualized, this close-up looks like a distinct composition, and it seems divorced from the rest of the mosaic in the Vatican Museums (Pl. II); from its ancient context in a Roman house; and from the lost mosaic in Pergamon on which the whole Vatican mosaic is based. What is more, this close-up contains modern restorations and additions – including its most famous and memorable feature, a mouse nibbling on a cracked nut. Yet it is intriguing. Here, the spectator sees hyperrealistic representations of all manner of discarded scraps from the table, complete with the shadows that they cast: a lobster shell, a crab leg, grapes, grape stalks, chicken bones, sea shells, nuts, and a fig. This small excerpt, then, leaves her hungry for more.