Final Thoughts

The original sin was embraced and sought to accomplish. For every political unit supremacy is a need, an obsession, and a deep desire; and what a better means to achieve such an ambition than becoming a god. It is a lust for any state to acquire divinity; what are “national values”, ideological enterprises —what are patriotism and “civic duty”— but expressions and ideas of the same feature. Achieving full, indisputable allegiance is desired by every political unit; with it comes legitimacy and internal security, while external power increases by means of unity and mobilization capability.

“Empire” means “political control exercised by one organized political unit over another unit separate from and alien to it. […] [Its] essential core is political: the possession of final authority by one entity over the vital political decisions of another.”[1] This is what it was sought to assure and protect with political artifacts like the “Victory Stele”—the Akkadian control over other Mesopotamian political units.

A horned head-dress, an unnatural size, an unstoppable ascendance, the presence of the divine and the mundane, violence, victory… These are not only symbols of the apotheosis of a man, they are eternal manifestations of the deification of what this god-kind represented: The Akkadian state. It was not Naram-Sin who gained a place among Sumerian gods; it was Agade itself who entered the Mesopotamian pantheon. This new god did represent an element in nature —as all the other Sumerian deities—: the political nature of men; their need for power, their eternal battle to overcome their weakness and prevail.