Hannah Arendt, Kingship and the Gods

On a recent trip to the Hannah Arendt Collection housed in Bard College's Stevenson Library, we came across this copy of Henri Frankfort's Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society & Nature:

Hannah Arendt made several annotations in her copy of this book. For example, on page 22, she placed two vertical lines next to a passage that reads as follows:

Reconciliation, an unchanging order in which conflicting forces play their allotted part--that is the Egyptian's view of the world and also his conception of the state.

On the opposite page, Arendt placed a single vertical line adjacent to the following text:

Thus Amon-Re is called "He who begets his father," a paradoxical formula for the line of thought we have just described and which we find expressed, simply and directly, in the following pyramid text: "O Re, impregnate the body of Nut with the seed of that spirit that must be in her" (Pyr. 990a).

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The Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College is maintained by staff members at the Bard College Stevenson Library. To peruse the collection's digital entries, please click here.

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