We typically think of power as economic, military, or political. In this war-torn millennium, stealth aircraft and smart bombs come to mind. In past cultures, we think of invaders on horseback or sailing ships armed with cannons. We rarely think of power as an intangible invention of leaders, elites, artists, sculptors, or storytellers in imperial courts. But from the dawn of civilization, kings, empires, and societies have developed self-aggrandizing narratives in inscriptions, relief art, literary works, and political tracts. Fictional History, Fabricated Power traces narratives of power from prominent cultures across the globe. The continental divide of this study is the distinction between story and fact, the latter becoming the primary unit of knowledge with the rise of empirical science. The motivation was the need to establish a person, society, culture, or ideology as separate and superior through imaginative means. Before the Renaissance, meaning was stored and communicated through narrative, which Hayden White (1989, 1) described as a “metacode” understandable to all members of a culture. More broadly, Roland Barthes (1977, 79) described narrative as “international, transhistorical, transcultural,” a “human universal” according to Donald Brown (1991), defining it as a reservoir of primary importance for discovering how cultures worldwide throughout history invented themselves. The ubiquity of invented history defines this as a rich area for probing the social and psychological nature of power.

Effects of this approach are several; those relevant to this study are three. From the dawn of civilization, kings or their loyal elites created narratives of power as enhancements of their persons, positions, and authority. From any objective viewpoint, these defy historical verification; such narratives are almost entirely fictional. This is true not only with kings and lawgivers but also with spiritual leaders who stand as founders of major world religions. Second, entire populations have been receptive to such narratives and thus responded with almost uniform support for their leaders and dedication to their kingdoms and empires. This behavior is a fact of observation; quite apart from issues of historical fact, such narratives meet imaginative needs of populations so influenced. Third, entire populations have been empowered by elaborate narratives of imperial origins and back histories that justify nationalist and imperialist behavior—the subjugation of other cultures and, in some cases, persecution, inquisition, execution, ethnic cleansing, and wholesale destruction.