Neo-Assyrian Imperial Religion Counts: A Quantitative Approach to the Affiliations of Kings and Queens with Their Gods and Goddesses

This article pursues a quantitative approach to measure and compare the frequency with which Neo-Assyrian kings and queens co-occur with deities across thousands of cuneiform documents. For the large corpus of kings’ texts, we used an automated method to collect data that is digitally available in the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc). For the much smaller corpus of queens’ texts, we collected data manually. As output, we offer new bodies of data on the textual co-occurrences of kings and queens with gods and goddesses. We interpret and rank these co-occurrence trends as royal-divine affiliations. Until now, these affiliations have only been qualitatively acknowledged and in some cases have been under-considered. In addition, most research on Neo-Assyrian imperial religion has focused on kings. Here we study both kings and queens (especially Naqi'a) as we explore gendered religious practice and move toward an interpretation of the royal couple as a cooperative entity in Assyrian religion.