| Apologetic is the rhetoric of self-defense. The motives of most public figures come under scrutiny at some point, and when allegations of malfeasance impugn their character, apologetic discourse serves to justify their behavior and restore their reputation. In the ancient Near East, it was common for a king who assumed the throne under irregular circumstances to face accusations of misconduct committed during his rise to power; these accusations undermined the new king and destabilized the regime. In response to such a situation the king often commissioned an apology to defend the legitimacy of his deeds and his person.;Scholars have interpreted many ancient Near Eastern texts with their apologetic functions in mind, but in doing so they have often misconstrued the nature of apologetic. The prevalent misunderstanding in the scholarly literature holds that the royal apology was a widely known literary genre with a certain form to which the apologists subscribed, leading interpreters to homogenize the various examples and to theorize direct lines of influence between the cultures in which the putative form is found. This study seeks to correct this through an investigation of genre theory, concluding that the royal apology is a rhetorical genre, which is a transhistorical category defined by the exigence that elicited the apologetic discourse. With this in mind, this study fulfills a lacuna in previous scholarship by providing a definition of apologetic applicable to the field of ancient Near Eastern studies.;The bulk of the present examination is an illustration of the nature of apologetic through the close analysis of seven ancient Near Eastern royal apologies. With each text the specific accusations leveled against the unexpected king and the apologist's defenses are examined. Reading the analyses in concert allows one easily to identify the common exigence that unites the discourses rhetorically but preserves the singularity of each text that result from the individual kings' unique circumstances. The study thus serves both to refine the methodology employed in analyzing royal apologies and to perform this analysis on seven important works. |
