IV. Propaganda, Divinity, and Dominion

A modern politician, becoming an eternal god. Who would dare to defy such a divine creature and the work that gained him heaven?

 

John James Barralet, "The Apotheosis of Washington" or "The Commemoration of Washington (1802)."

In the struggle for power, acquisition of power is a common need; the group who does not succeed in this effort perishes. The State is the maximum position any political group can reach. It means the exercise of sovereignty —absolute power over decision, as Schmitt says—[1] over population, and more notably over other political units trying to achieve state control. Nevertheless, once achieved internal supremacy, the state faces another struggle outside of its dominion: other states —political units external to its rule. Therefore, the state is continuously challenged by outside enemies and it is also faced with the threat of the emergence of internal groups averse to its control.

A means to deal with this problem is propaganda. As stated above, the symbolic messages embodied in this kind of political artifacts try to penetrate the receptor’s perceptions and infuse a certain idea in his mind. The “Victory Stele” was such an instrument. Naram-Sin’s apotheosis had a profound political meaning because it was rooted in a deeply religious context. It is not possible to know if the king of Agade was named god by popular acclamation —as quoted before— or if this was just a story invented by the Akkadian state; what can be known is that this acquired divinity was used politically as a means of propaganda.

By means of the symbols depicted in the “Victory Stele” and what they together represent, the Akkadian state and his leader showed what they were able and capable of doing with the power they had acquired. Even more, they claimed that, on top of their actual, real, earthly power, they have also achieved the ultimate power of divinity. By publically representing this in a monument, the political unit in control of Agade sought to assure its dominion over the minds of its rivals and its own people.

The last two Akkadian kings —Rimush and Manishtusu— had been murdered in palace conspiracies. Thus, it can be inferred that for the royal political group and the king himself internal security —control, the assertion of dominion over potential or actual rival political groups— was an issue. Moreover, being the Akkadian population under a continuous state of war against other cities, it was a necessity for the state to keep popular moral high; otherwise, it could face social opposition to go to war and to contribute to the effort it meant —Akkadian state’s legitimacy could be endangered. In sum, king Naram-Sin and his political group needed to assure their primacy over their rivals, while reinforcing their legitimacy over Akkadian society. The “Victory Stele” was a means to accomplish so. To rival political groups, it showed an undefeatable —even divine— ruling group; to the people, it was a statement of the worth of their effort and an encouraging image of their own glory, and that of their leader. Glory, legitimacy and fear cannot be separated.

After the rebellion of the “four quarters of the earth”[2] to the Akkadian rule and the war effort needed to finish such an uprising, Naram-Sin understood that a complementary part of defeat is to infuse it into the minds of his enemies. Representing the Akkadian king as a deity worked both as an offense instrument and as a defense tool against other states. This kind of political-religious propaganda was offensive and colonizing after the battle was over, its effects took place in the beliefs of the warring states’ population. To support a war against a god and his divine hordes became irrational for ordinary people. The defensive character of artifacts such as the “Victory Stele” was based on its very colonizing effects; these monuments were built in order to assert dominion, to infuse fear, to threat life —pictorially—, and, therefore, to make defiance impossible to imagine, irrational.