Exemplars of Kingship and the Art of Memory

This chapter offers a history of the Akkadian kings and a survey of the cultural memory traditions that sustained their memory in Mesopotamia, including textual, material, and visual evidence. Without posthumous images of the Akkadians, one must look for visual allusions to the Akkadian past in post-Akkadian images. A theoretical and methodological framework for the study of the visual legacy of Akkadian kingship emerges from considerations of Oppenheim’s “stream of tradition,” the mechanics of visual traditions, interpictoriality and intervisuality, and the temporality of images (with reference to Nagel and Wood’s substitutional images and Warburg’s visual formulas). The Sun-God Tablet of Nabu-apla-iddina and representations of Neo-Assyrian kings illustrate the connections between visual traditions, authority, and time in Mesopotamia.