This is a blog which grew out of an invitation to Andrew in early 2020 to do a lockdown zoom on queer monarchs. It’s becoming an alternative British history, beginning in the Persian Gulf with lions.
The first male monarch known to have affected us here in the British Isles and Ireland lived some 4700 years ago and some 4000 miles away beside the shores of the Persian Gulf.
He is ‘He Who Saw the Abyss’, sometimes shown in ancient carvings squeezing a pair of live lions under his arms, as in the inset picture here. A man of many names, he was also called Gilgamesh, probably meaning Heroic Young Ancestor, and unsurprisingly, given the lions, he was also called Master of Animals.