The Akkadian kings (ca. 2334–2154 BCE) created the first territorial state in the ancient Near East and were remembered as model kings for more than two millennia thereafter. Exemplars of Kingship: Art, Tradition, and the Legacy of the Akkadians evaluates how later rulers engaged with Akkadian visual models and memories of Akkadian kingship in their own images. Through analyses of post-Akkadian victory monuments, votive statues, cylinder seals, and other works of art, the book explores the intersection of visual traditions and cultural memory in ancient Mesopotamia. Exemplars of Kingship also deconstructs the modern reception of Akkadian art to reveal its impact on our perception of ancient responses to Akkadian art and kingship.
Although modern scholarship has been slow to recognize it because of the fragmentary condition of Akkadian royal statues, post-Akkadian rulers responded to the votive statues of the Akkadian kings in a variety of ways. The statues of Gudea of Lagash, the kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur, and rulers of Mari and Eshnunna from the late third and early second millennia BCE replicate specific Akkadian sculptural features in order to emulate, critique, or affiliate with the dynasty. Other statues, such as a statue from Ashur possibly connected to a Kassite king and statues associated with Puzur-Inshushinak of Susa, resemble the Akkadian models so closely that it cannot be determined if they are appropriated Akkadian statues or newly produced imitations. This chapter explores the circumstances that would have led the rulers to usurp or closely imitate an Akkadian royal statue.
The visual legacy of Akkadian kingship in Mesopotamia was the product of a series of individual engagements with Akkadian images and memories that collectively suggest a shift over time from direct engagement with Akkadian models to mediated access to Akkadian models. Beyond consolidating the ideas presented in earlier chapters, chapter 6 opens up further lines of inquiry into the relationship between cultural memory and images in the ancient Near East. First, memories of the Akkadians in Hittite Anatolia raise the possibility of a visual legacy in Hittite art. Second, the Akkadian legacy is compared to the legacy of the Ur III kings. In the latter, a set of late Neo-Assyrian “basket-bearer” steles display interpictorial links to Ur III foundation figures.
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