Image Details

Erich Lessing

Commemorating a victory over the Lullubians, a mountain people, this 6 1/2-foot-high, sandstone stela shows Naram-Sin, top, standing before a stylized mountain while his soldiers trample the enemy. Grandson of Sargon the Great and king of Akkad (2254–2218 B.C.), in Mesopotamia, Naram-Sin made a startling innovation in the Akkadian conception of kingship by representing himself as divine. On this stela, he wears the horned aguÆ, the crown of the gods. Some scholars have contended that Moses’ horns similarly symbolized a kind of divinity that had been bestowed on him.