Modelling development and learning

The first era of independent Sumerian city-states in southern Mesopotamia was shattered by Sargon, King of Akkad (reigned ca. 2370–2315 BC), who conquered the entire region ca. 2350 BC. This great king’s likeness may survive in a life-size (30cm high) cast copper head found out of context in a much later Neo-Assyrian temple at Nineveh in northern Iraq (Figure 3.1). With the elaborately braided hair tied in the back, the curled beard, and the placid smile, this head is elegant and serene. Only the damaged eyes and ears, perhaps intentional mutilations by the ruler’s enemies to destroy the spirit present in the statue, mar its tranquility.

The Akkadians: ca. 2350–2150 BC

The Gutians: ca. 2150–2000 BC

The Sumerians (second period of domination):

Neo-Sumerian period: ca. 2125–2000 BC

Gudea of Lagash

Ur III period (= Third Dynasty of Ur): ca. 2100–2000 BC

Old Babylonian period: ca. 2000–1530 BC

Isin-Larsa period: ca. 2000–1760 BC

First Dynasty of Babylon: ca. 1830–1531 BC

Hammurabi of Babylon: ca. 1728–1686 BC

The Kassites: ca. 1530–1150 BC

The Akkadian state is generally considered the first empire in south-west Asia. The heart of Sargon’s king-dom was central Mesopotamia, in the region of Babylon and modern Baghdad. He established a new capital city, Agade (Akkad), thus breaking with traditional Sumerian seats of power. To the chagrin of archaeologists, Agade has not yet been identified, and so we have no Akkadian city to describe.

Sargon’s activities, however, and those of his succes-sors are amply reported in the cuneiform tablets. Once he had conquered the Sumerian cities, Sargon turned his attention to the east, to Elam (south-west Iran), and then northwards up the Tigris and westwards up the Euphrates into central Anatolia. If the ancient accounts are to be believed, he ventured even as far as the south-ern edge of the Arabian peninsula and into the Medi-terranean to Cyprus and Crete. Only parts of this vast area could be firmly maintained under his authority. But these campaigns must have had the effect of stimulat-ing commercial contacts between Akkad and distant suppliers of timber, metals, and other raw materials.

Sargon was a Semite, not a Sumerian. The language he spoke, Akkadian, written in a modified cuneiform script based on the Sumerian, would remain the lingua franca of the Near East for some 2,000 years until gradually it ceded its place to Aramaic. The evidence of names of people and places in the Sumerian tablets indicates that a substantial contingent of Semites lived in ED Sumer. The further north one went within Mesopotamia, the greater their numbers. Their origins are uncertain, as is true for the Sumerians themselves. Despite different speech, these peoples shared the same cultural patterns, the same religious beliefs. For example, Enheduanna, a daughter of Sargon, became a priestess of Nanna, the moon god of Sumerian Ur. The Akkadian rulers, however, contributed a new concept of kingship to ancient Mesopotamia, the elevation of the mortal rulers to the position of ultimate authority in the state, in place of the gods.

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 cel-ebrated 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 col-lection of defeated enemies lies wounded or dead at his feet. In the middle of the stele one

Figure 3.1 Bronze head, Akkadian period, from Nineveh. Iraq Museum, Baghdad

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 parabola-shaped commemorative stele.

The relief serves the same propaganda pur-pose 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 expres-sion of the ruler and indeed the very concept of kingship have moved in a new direction.

No longer confined to the narrow horizon-tal 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,

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

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.