Obelisk of Manishtushu

The text records a series of very large land purchases made by the king from private owners in northern Babylonia. For each estate it lists the size of the fields, the price paid in silver and grain, the sellers, the witnesses, and the extra gifts of clothing, oil and bronze handed to the families involved. The lists of names read like a census of the landed clans of the region. The museum record also notes a passage in which Manishtushu tells how he sent boats across the Lower Sea, the Gulf, defeated thirty-two kings, and brought back black stone from the mountains beyond. The dark gabbro of the monument itself was a prestige material that had to be imported over long distances.

The obelisk did not stay in Babylonia. In the twelfth century before our era the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte raided the cities of Mesopotamia and carried their monuments home to Susa, in present-day Iran, as trophies. The French mission that dug the acropolis of Susa at the end of the nineteenth century found the obelisk there, alongside the Code of Hammurabi and the Victory Stele of Naram-Sin, and it came to the Louvre under the excavation partage agreement with Persia. It remains one of the longest surviving texts of the Akkadian period and a rare window onto how land, money and family ties worked more than four thousand years ago.

Did You Know? The inscription runs to more than fifteen hundred cases of text, yet it is essentially a set of property deeds recording who sold what land to the king and for how much silver.