The Stele of Naram-Sin

The Stele of Naram-Sin is a parabolic-shape slab of pink sandstone, almost 2m tall, decorated on one side with relief sculpture that commemorates an Akkadian victory over the Lullubi, a mountain people living in what is today western Iran (Figure 3.2). The victorious king, here celebrated by his dominant place in the relief, is Naram-Sin, the grandson of Sargon. During a later, twelfth-century BC Elamite invasion of Mesopotamia, the stele was seized as booty and taken to Susa, the Elamite capital — where the French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan uncovered it in the late nineteenth century.

The martial theme is already familiar from earlier Near Eastern art, but the composition of the scene differs from Sumerian examples. Naram-Sin stands high on a steep forested hillside. He wears a horned helmet, the symbol of divinity, and carries a bow. A representative collection of defeated enemies lies wounded or dead at his feet. In the middle of the stele one victim plunges head first into the ravine. Below the king, his own soldiers stride up the hill, or turn to gaze upwards (those on the right side of the scene). The sun and the moon (the two rosette disks in the sky), divinities here, look down on Naram-Sin and on what may be a conical mountain — or perhaps a parabolashaped commemorative stele.

Figure 3.2 Stele of Naram-Sin, from Susa. Louvre Museum, Paris

The relief serves the same propaganda purpose as, for example, the earlier Stele of the Vultures: the exaltation of the king and his great victory. On the Stele of the Vultures (Figure 2.11), the identity of the king Ean-natum among the warriors is never in doubt, for he is shown larger than life. But the god Ningirsu, larger still, very much takes part in the battle; victory is in fact won because of the favorable intervention of the god. The Stele of Naram-Sin builds on this ideological and visual foundation, but the pictorial expression of the ruler and indeed the very concept of kingship have moved in a new direction. No longer confined to the narrow horizontal bands of Sumerian art, the Akkadian ruler is displayed in a single grand image. Assisted by the diagonal lines of the hillside and the soldiers’ faces turned upwards, the eye of the viewer focuses immediately on the king. Not only is he much larger than the other men, he is also virtually the sole figure in the entire upper half of the scene. Most important, as his horned helmet signifies, he has himself become a god. In confirmation of the image, texts tell us that Naram-Sin was addressed as a god during his lifetime, the first Mesopotamian ruler to be accorded this distinction. In this way, the king could claim a share of the prestige and possessions attributed to the deities.

Assertions of might and divinity did not suffice to protect Naram-Sin and his son Shar-kali-sharri. The Akkadian dynasty established by Sargon, now over-extended and weakened, was brought to an end by the Gutians, another mountain people from western Iran, neighbors of the Lullubi. A Sumerian poet writing several centuries later attributed the disaster to an act of sacrilege committed by Naram-Sin. According to this poet, Naram-Sin sacked the holy city of Nippur and defiled the Ekur, the sanctuary to the god Enlil. In revenge, Enlil sent the Gutians on a rampage. To spare the other cities of Sumer, eight major gods agreed that Agade must suffer the same fate she inflicted on Nippur:

City, you who dared assault the Ekur, who [defied] Enlil, May your groves be heaped up like dust. . .

May your canalboat towpaths grow nothing but weeds,

Moreover, on your canalboat towpaths and landings,

May no human being walk because of the wild goats, vermin (?), snakes, and mountain scorpions,

Agade, instead of your sweet-flowing water, may bitter water flow.

(from “The Curse of Agade: the Ekur Avenged,” in Kramer 1963: 65)

And indeed, that seems to be exactly what happened to this proud city.