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In accordance, then, with the order already indicated, law and government as administered by the political society in the person of its representatives, chiefs, elders, war-lords, priest-kings, and so forth, must first be examined; then the jurisdiction and discipline of subordinate bodies, such as the family and the clan, or again the religious societies, trade guilds, and the rest; then, lastly, the international conventions, with the available means of ensuring their observance.
In fact, the Kings and Queens of Knossos were Priest-Kings and Priest-Queens, the heads of the spiritual as well as of the material life of their people; and it is not at all unlikely, from what is known of the religious views of other ancient peoples, that the Priest-King was looked upon as an incarnation of divinity. If so, of what divinity?
It has been suggested that since the statues of Telloh are those of the priest-kings, only the priestly classes shaved their hair off. See an interesting discussion of the question by Professor Hommel, "Arabia according to the Latest Discoveries and Researches." Sunday School Times, 1895, nos. 41 and 43. See Hilprecht, Old Babylonian Inscriptions, i. 16-18.
And so things went on and on, until the Society passed through the same stage through which humanity had passed when the Priest-Kings entirely disappeared, and when those words were spoken by one of the Great Ones: "The Society has liberated itself from our grasp and influence, and we have let it go; we make no unwilling slaves.... Out of the three Objects the second alone is attended to; it is no longer either a Brotherhood, nor a body over the face of which broods the Spirit from beyond the Great Range."
Religion, indeed, seems to have bulked very largely in the economy of the House of Minos, which is what might have been expected when one remembers the closeness of the relations between Zeus and Minos as depicted in the legends, and realizes that very probably the Kings of Knossos were Priest-Kings, and perhaps even incarnations of the Bull-god.
Few museums are without a pair of leather sandals, or a specimen of mummy braces with ends of stamped leather bearing the effigy of a god, a Pharaoh, a hieroglyphic legend, a rosette, or perhaps all combined. These little relics are not older than the time of the priest-kings, or the earlier Bubastites.
Sometimes man makes the divinities descend upon earth, charging them with the care of ruling nations, and giving them laws, as in the fables of the East; sometimes, as among the Greeks and other nations of the West, they are the first monarchs, priest-kings, who are stripped of what is human in their nature, to be raised to the rank of national divinities.
There seemed to be a vast number of these priest-kings, but perhaps they were better than the gold masks of the great Ptolemaic ladies which glinted at him through the gathering gloom. Really, he had seen enough of the upper floors.
It would be possible to write the history of these priest-kings without dwelling more than lightly on scandalous circumstances, to merge the court-chronicle of the Vatican in a recital of European politics, or to hide the true features of high Papal dignitaries beneath the masks constructed for them by ecclesiastical apologists.
Any facts that may hereafter be discovered in America respecting the remains of a sacerdotal caste appears to me calculated to excite great interest, on account of those priest-kings of Peru, who styled themselves the children of the Sun; and of those sun-kings among the Natchez, who recall to mind the Heliades of the first eastern colony of Rhodes.
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