The earliest narratives of kingship and kingship power appeared in the third millennium BCE in Mesopotamia. Charles Keith Maisels (1990) places “the emergence of civilization” in this region with particularly rich evidence from the Zagros Mountains of Iraq, the mountainous regions of south-central Turkey, and the river valleys of northern Syria. The claim by Samuel Noah Kramer (1956) that “history begins at Sumer” applies to the supremacy of the Sumerian kings. Their mythic legacy was transferred through subsequent civilizations that arose throughout the Fertile Crescent, the well-watered plains bounded on the east and north by the highlands of the Zagrosian Arc. The decline of glaciation that had lasted for millennia may well have induced climate change that led to a warming trend of particular benefit for the Mesopotamian Valley and adjacent regions (Mithen 2003). The Middle East, along with the peripheral areas of Iran, Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, has been the most thoroughly studied of any region in the world through scores of archaeological excavations since the nineteenth century. Despite the inevitable attrition of records, loss of written materials, and the looting of ancient ruins and graves, enough from this region has survived to develop a reasonably coherent history of leadership in the earliest urban centers. Mesopotamia provides a template for this development that is not always so evident in other cultures or regions.

Inscriptional, literary, and archaeological records show that the power and authority for leaders emerged early based on narratives that set them apart from the general population. The central narrative was an uncompromising status of divinity applied to the Sumerian kings. The efficacy of such invented stories rested on their power to capture the imaginations of the people, focusing attention on their leaders by attributing them with uncontestable authority, and motivating the people to act on their behalf. The idea of Sumerian kings as sharing in the divine took time to develop, but once it became the dominant narrative, its origins were projected millennium into the past.

One of the earliest accounts of kingship, the Sumerian King List, is a part-historical part-mythic list of ancient kings. It remained central to Mesopotamian culture from its composition early in the second millennium for at least the next 16 centuries.