History Is The Struggle Between Aryan Kings And Jewish Priests
“It was out of the two main weaknesses of all priesthoods—namely, the incapacity for efficient military leadership and their inevitable jealousy of all other religious cults—that the power of secular kingship arose. The foreign enemy either prevailed and set up a king over the people, or the priesthoods, who would not give way to each other, set up a common fighting captain, who retained more or less power in peace time. This secular king developed a group of officials about him and began, in relation to military organization, to take a share in the administration of the people’s affairs. So, growing out of priest-craft and beside the priest, the king, the protagonist of the priest, appears upon the stage of human history, and a very large amount of the subsequent experiences of mankind is only to be understood as an elaboration, complication, and distortion of the struggle, unconscious or deliberate, between these two systems of human control, the temple and the palace.
It was in the original centers of civilization that this antagonism was most completely developed. The barbaric Aryan peoples, who became ultimately the masters of all the ancient civilizations of the Orient and of the western world, may never have passed through a phase of temple rule on their way to civilization; they came to civilization late; they found that drama already half-played. They took over the ideas of both temple and kingship, when those ideas were already elaborately developed, from the more civilized Hamitic or Semitic peoples they conquered.
The greater importance of the gods and the priests in the earlier history of the Mesopotamian civilization is very apparent, but gradually the palace won its way until it was at last in a position to struggle definitely for the purpose of power. At first, in the story, the palace is ignorant and friendless in the face of the temple; the priests alone read, the priests alone know, the people are afraid of them. But in the dissensions of the various cults comes the opportunity of the palace. From other cities, from among captives, from defeated or suppressed religious cults, the palace gets men who also can read and who can do magic things.“
-Excerpted from the “Outline of History” by H.G. Wells (1919)