IMPRESSION OF THE CYLINDER-SEAL DEDICATED TO THE GOD MESLAMTAEA BY KILULLA-GUZALA ON BEHALF OF DUNGI, KING OF UR.—Brit. Mus., No. 89131.
To the time of the kings of Akkad must also be assigned the Stele of Victory, two fragments of which have been found at Tello, sculptured on both faces with bas-reliefs, arranged in registers, above an inscription.[82] The sculptor has represented his battle-scenes as a series of hand-to-hand conflicts, and here we see bearded Semitic warriors, armed with spear, axe, or bow and arrows, smiting their enemies. The inscription is very broken, but enough is preserved to indicate that it enumerates a number of estates or tracts of land, some, if not all of them, situated in the neighbourhood of Lagash, which have been assigned to different high officials. The summary at the end of the text is partly preserved, and states that the list comprised seventeen chief cities and eight chief places, and it ends with a record that may probably be restored to read: "Besides Akkad, the kingdom, which he had received, [was the patesiate of Lagash given to ...]." It would thus seem that the stele was set up in Lagash to commemorate its acquisition by a king of Akkad, who at the same time rewarded his own courtiers and officials by assigning them parts of the conquered territory. The name of the king is wanting in the text, and we must depend on conjecture to decide the reign or period to which it belongs.
A comparison of the monument with Narâm-Sin's Stele of Victory will show that, though the attitudes of the figures are natural and vigorous, the sculptor does not display quite the same high qualities of composition and artistic arrangement. This fact might conceivably be employed in favour of assigning the stele to a period of decadence when the dynasty of Shar-Gani-sharri may have fallen before the onset of some fresh wave of Semitic hordes. But the impression given by the monument is that of a vigorous art struggling towards perfection rather than the rude imitation of a more perfect style, and it is probable that we must date it in an early, rather than in a late, period during this epoch of Semitic domination.[83]
The reference to "Akkad, the kingdom," in the summary at the end of the text, renders it difficult to assign it to an early king of Kish such as Sharru-Gi, for we should then have to assume that Shar-Gani-sharri's dynasty was not the earliest one to rule in Akkad, and
