Victory Stele of Naram-Sin
Unknown · c. 2254-2218 BC
Naram-Sin, fourth ruler of the Akkadian empire and grandson of Sargon of Akkad, commissioned this monument to celebrate crushing the Lullubi, a mountain people of the Zagros. It was set up in Sippar, a city sacred to the sun god, as a permanent advertisement of a king who had begun writing his own name with the divine determinative and calling himself God of Akkad. The stele is a piece of political theatre in stone, and it broke decisively with the neat horizontal registers that Mesopotamian artists had used for centuries.
Instead of stacked bands, a single diagonal landscape sweeps upward. The Akkadian troops climb a wooded mountainside in disciplined ranks while the enemy tumbles, pleads and dies among the trees. At the apex stands the king, larger than everyone else, wearing the horned helmet of a god, bow in one hand and spear in the other, one foot planted on a fallen Lullubi. Above him hang solar discs, the gods reduced to emblems so that nothing competes with the royal body. Notice the enemy who raises his hands in surrender and the one who has taken a spear through the throat, small human notes inside the propaganda.
Like the Code of Hammurabi, the stele was carried off to Susa as plunder by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte in the twelfth century BC, who added his own inscription in Elamite. Jacques de Morgan's team found it on the Susa acropolis on 6 April 1898. Its conical shape is often read as a stylised mountain, and the composition it invented, hero at the summit of a diagonal, echoes through Near Eastern and later Western battle imagery.
Did You Know? Naram-Sin was the first Mesopotamian king to wear the horned crown of a god in art, and he is shown doing exactly that here, roughly a thousand years before Hammurabi.
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