A Study of Temporality in West Semitic Royal Inscriptions

Abstract This study examines how the experience of time is articulated in West Semitic royal inscriptions from the Iron Age Levant. To do so, I examine two temporal indices or scaffolds on which the broader architecture of temporal experience is constructed within this corpus. The first is what I term dynastic time, a perspective organized around a ruler’s life and lineage that governs how past, present, and future are conceived within these writings. The second is the time attributed to material remains, or how these inscriptions account for the age of ruins and the dilapidated structures that are often referred to within them. What is historically meaningful about these descriptions and their attendant references, I argue, is a specific reckoning with the flow of time, where we are offered insights into how these writings apprehend a sense of temporal duration. When compared to royal inscriptions commissioned by contemporaneous Assyrian and Babylonian rulers, what appears in the West Semitic corpus, I contend further, is a reduced temporal framework whose retrospective and prospective visions rarely exceed a generation and, at most, extend roughly a century into the past or future. This investigation then concludes by examining what historical factors may have shaped this distinct sense of time conveyed in the West Semitic tradition of royal inscriptions.