Object Agency? Spatial Perspective, Social Relations, and the Stele of Hammurabi. Pp. 148-165 in...

Agency and Identity in

the Ancient Near East

N e w Paths Forward

edited by

Sharon R. Steadman and

Jennifer C. Ross

Equinox Publishing Ltd

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Object Agency?

Spatial Perspective, Social Relations, and the

Stele of Hammurabi *

Marian H. Feldman

Can Objects have Agency?

Though perhaps unorthodox, I feel this article requires a somewhat lengthy introduction before embarking on the specifics of the case study at hand. When I first agreed to contribute to a volume on agency and the ancient Near East I thought it would be relatively straightforward in terms of the guiding concept of agency; I envisioned my challenges to lie instead in the details of my case study. As a scholar who takes material culture as my primary focus and approaches it through an anthro-pologically informed lens of social engagement, I did not anticipate the force of the reaction against the idea of object agency that I encountered in my various discussions with colleagues as the project took shape. This resistance took the form of comments such as: things can't act, only people can; or: agency can only be ascribed/attributed to things, because all 'real' action stems from an individ-ual's intentions. Despite the fact that definitions of agency and agent even in Webster's Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary embrace objects as 'actors',11 found that the notion of object agency troubles many within the field of the ancient Near East.

It became apparent to me that the term agency itself came freighted with expectations, assump-tions, and baggage that were rarely acknowledged by my interlocutors. And while many of these assumptions have been addressed and, in my opinion, in large measure resolved in scholarship in

* This article owes a great debt to work done by an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, My Chau (Class of 2008) for the McNair Scholars Program. Many of my thoughts were inspired and shaped by our conversations. In addition, I would like to thank Madeleine Fitzgerald, Greg Levine, Bernard Knapp, Glenn Schwartz, Jennifer Stager, and Niek Veldhuis for reading early drafts, as well as colleagues at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University who provided stimulating insights on the concept of agency. The resulting conclusions are, however, wholly my own responsibility.

1. Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (2001) includes in its defini-tion of agency, 'the state of being in action or of exerting power; a means of exerting power or influence; instrumentality'; and for agent: 'a natural force or object producing or used for obtaining specific results'. The OED (2nd ed., 1989), in its definition of agency as instrumentality and intermediation, cites 19th-century usage to describe fire and the sea (accessed online, Oct. 2, 2008 at: http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ 50004307?query_type=word&query word=agency&first = 1 &max_to_show =10 Scsingle=1 &sort_type =alpha&case_id=TubP-zIQuKc-9149 & p = 1 &d = 1 &sp = 1 &qt = 1 &ct = O&ad = 1 &print = 1).

http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/

OBJECT AGENCY? 1 4 9

other fields, this literature has had little impact within the sphere of ancient Near Eastern studies (see, e.g., Tilley 2006a:9-10; Hoskins 2006; Farquhar 2006:154-55). At the crux of the issue lie the philosophical ontologies within which we practice our scholarship and of which for the most part we are unaware. At its crudest (and most reductionist) level, it devolves around the dichotomy between Cartesian and phenomenological philosophies concerning the place of human beings in and their relationship with the world (Thomas 2006:46). Are human beings, by dint of their minds, completely other than the world they inhabit (as per Descartes), or are they ensnared and enmeshed within a fabric of physical existence such that it is impossible to abstract them? I ask for the reader's patience with the following excursus on object agency, as it is necessary for me briefly to unpack the implications of these thoughts before I can move on to the specifics of my project.

In recent years, Alfred Gell's scholarship (1998, 1999) has provided the greatest stimulus for discussions regarding object agency, and in particular that of objects that Cell calls art due to their formal complexity and technical accomplishment. In Gell's conception, art objects act as secondary agents in conjunction with specific human associates; they acquire agency when enmeshed in social relationships (1998:17). Objectification in a concrete physical form is how social agency manifests and realizes itself (Gell 1998:21). Gell himself notes the paradox of attributing agency, which for him is based on an intentionality to act, to inanimate objects, but argues that human agency can only be exercised within a material world because there must be physical mediation for the 'agent' and 'patient' to interact (1998:19-20). Objects in this formulation are essential to the execution of agency, and in turn, agency can be abducted (that is surmised) from the object as its (the agent's) index.

Since the posthumous publication of Gell's Art and Agency in 1998, anthropologists and art historians have analyzed its various theoretical complexities and contradictions (especially, Dobres and Robb 2000a; Pinney and Thomas 2001; Gardner 2004; and Osborne and Tanner 2007b) and have questioned both the conceptual and terminological appropriateness of assigning 'agency' to objects (Dobres and Robb 2000a; Winter 2007). Within the ancient Near Eastern context, Irene Winter (2007) argues that we should maintain a distinction between 'agency' as a distinctly human quality and 'affect' as a property of inanimate (non-human) entities. This qualm rests in part on the question of intentionality; that is, does agency only denote socially significant, intentional action (Dobres and Robb 2000b:10; Gardner 2004:6)? If one answers in the affirmative (e.g. Ortner 2006:134-36), then object agency tends to be precluded. However, if one defines agency as action that effects real social consequences, then one has to accept both unintended consequences of intended action and unconscious activity of the sort considered to be the main drivers of social tra-ditions by scholars such as Paul Connerton (his 'incorporated practices'; 1989) or Pierre Bourdieu (his concept of habitus-, 1977). Since people often act without any conscious evaluation of what their actions mean and their actions often have unintended consequences, a definition of agency that rests on intentionality is too restricted.

While part of the difficulty in defining agency lies in the question of intentionality, an even larger quandary for object agency revolves around the vexing notion of 'personhood' and of the 'individual' as the sole vehicle of agency (Dobres and Robb 2000b). The bounded nature of the Cartesian individual locates agency solely within the corporeal being of the human body (or more precisely, within the mind, which is somehow part of yet distinct from the body), which is con-ceived of as the entirety of the person. Ethnographic studies, however, have demonstrated that different societies have 'different concepts of the person, different understandings of the boundaries of and interpénétrations between people and things and one person and another' (Fowler 2004:6; also Hodder 2000:23-24; Gardner 2004:3; Van der Toorn 1996:115). Thus, we cannot posit a universal notion of individual personhood. Karel Van der Toorn (1996:115) has argued that for the Old Babylonian period, with which this study is concerned, the concept of personhood should be

1 5 0 AGENCY AND IDENTITY IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST

understood as a social role, rather than as an inwardly directed personality. For him, 'the virtual absence of interiority and subjectivity in the Babylonian (auto)biographical tradition follows from the concept of person as a social role and character. Individual identity, in this view, is not what you are deep down, but what you manifest to be: it is public and social' (Van der Toorn 1996:117). Gell proposes a concept of distributed personhood—whereby agents (and by extension agency) can exist both within a physical body and beyond it—derived from the ethnographic work of Marilyn Strathern (1998) in Melanesia. Winter (2007) likewise espouses this concept for Mesopotamia, because it allows for the need by a viewer to have awareness and analysis of the properties that generate the affect and thus permit appropriate inferences. Whitney Davis (2007), in a critique of Gell's work, points out that, despite calling for personhood distributed over many indexes, in practice Gell always points to a singular agent. Davis (2007:210) argues instead for a concept of 'multiple, ramified agency of extended mind or distributed personhood', referring to agency that is not limited to the individuated personal bodies of patrons, artists, or viewers, but rather one that includes them all as well as their settings of interaction, a point to which I will return shortly.

A further complicating factor in the study of object agency is the so-called 'double hermeneutic' (Barrett 2000 :66) that acknowledges the complicated relationship between indigenous 'emic' views of how ancient societies conceived of agency (for example, in beliefs such as shamanism or ani-mism) and our own, culturally informed understanding of how agency operates (Winter 2007 :61 ; Moore 2000 :259) . Ancient Mesopotamians themselves, as inferred from the textual and material record through time and space, consistently appear to have held rather strong views regarding the capacity for objects to exert agency (Winter 2007 ; Feldman 2009) . Yet in addition, I would suggest that it is not so easy to determine what 'our' views are on object agency. It is too simplistic to give the 'party-line' of rational, enlightened thinkers who recognize that nonhuman entities are passive when there is so much anecdotal evidence for the agentive qualities of material culture, such as photographs, even today (Mitchell 1996; 2005 :6-9 ; Freedberg 1989). Moreover, cultural psycholo-gists are demonstrating that much of what we might consider to be action or agency generated by our own intentions in fact derives from a vast field of social stimuli that extends well beyond our individual body/mind (Markus et al. 2006 ; Markus and Kitayama 2003 , 2004) .

Following Davis, one can make the argument that all 'agency' is distributed, since no one thing or person exists by its/him/herself in isolation—all are part of a socially connected and physical world (see, e.g., Thomas 2006) . One can still acknowledge that objects require human interactions in order for them to became animated and acquire agency, as becomes evident when one pushes the envelope in 'subjectivizing' objects (e.g. Mitchell 1996). Yet at the same time I would argue the reverse as well, that people require materiality for social relations, and thus we too are incarnated and acquire agency through our interactions with the material world around us. It is, therefore, not an oppositional but rather a dialectical and constitutive relationship between things and people (Meskell 2004 ; Tilley 2006b:61) . When viewed from this perspective, agency can be seen as a fundamentally social phenomenon, derived from interactions between people and people and between people and things. An intriguing variant of this stance has been proposed by the sociologist of science Andrew Pickering in his concept of the mangle of practice (1995). Refining the actor-network theory put forth by Bruno Latour (e.g. 2005) that sees society as a field of human and nonhuman (material) agency, Pickering argues for a symmetry between human and material agency that while parallel to one another are not equivalent and cannot be interchanged (1995:11-15). He describes the dialectical relations between the two instead as a process of 'constitutive intertwining' (Pickering 1995).2

2. A semi-popular narrative that traces the different ways that human and nonhuman agents affect one another and evolve together within social networks is Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire (2001).


Working through these issues surrounding the concept of object agency has led me to recognize that ultimately I am interested less in our terminology—whether we call it agency, affect, power, enchantment, or something else—and more in disentangling the specific means by which objects participate in and change social outcomes. In my quest for a better understanding of past social situations, it is this element of effecting relational change that initially drew me to the concept of agency. Because all human-material interactions involve social activity that can be understood as agency, I see a universality for the agentive capacity of objects, while at the same time acknowledg-ing that the specific configuration of this object agency is historically and culturally contingent (for related arguments, see Ortner 2006:136-37; Knapp and van Dommelen 2008; and see Castro Gessner, this volume). Such a broadly based understanding of agency may generalize it to the point of analytical uselessness (as noted by Dobres and Robb 2000b: 10). Nonetheless, I would argue that all entities, human and nonhuman, participate together in agentive interactions and that this should constitute the background not the foreground of our studies, just as, say, the concept of material culture having style constitutes the background for studies on the specific forms and mechanics of object style. Despite (or because of) the semantic burden of the term agency, it is perhaps time to move beyond a debate about its applicability to a closer analysis of the mechanisms of change themselves. In the remainder of this paper, I would like to explore one particular mechanism by which objects produce social change: the formal properties of spatial rendering, or what we call perspective. Specifically, I argue that the depiction of representational space acts to position and constitute the viewer through a combination of distancing and ensnarement.

The Stele of Hammurabi and Agentive Perspective

Visual perception of spatial relationships is one particularly strong force in the dynamic enmesh-ment of art object and viewer and thus can be considered participatory or agentive with respect to both object and audience. To examine this phenomenon, I focus on the Stele of Hammurabi (ca. 1760 BCE)3 and the shift in the two-dimensional rendering of the divine horned headdress from a frontal to a profile perspective seen on it (Figure 1). In contrast, examples of profile-facing deities from the periods preceding Hammurabi's reign, such as on the Stele of Ur-Namma from Ur (ca. 2100 BCE), depict the horns frontally (Figure 2). When removed from teleological explanations of artistic progress toward naturalism, as is argued below, this occurrence poses the question of why this particular visual shift took place at this particular time. I suggest that we can approach the problem through what Hanneke Grootenboer (2006:497) has recently dubbed 'histories of vision' involving patterns of looking and strategies for showing that mobilize the field of engagement between art and human beings. The importance of vision and visuality in Mesopotamian culture is already well established (Winter 2000).4 Here, I explore how a specific visuality of spatial relations, materialized in the perspectival rendering on Hammurabi's stele, served as an agent in the fashion-ing of the Old Babylonian subject.

The Stele of Hammurabi sits squarely within the accepted 'canon' of Mesopotamian monuments and has received its fair share of scholarly inquiry in the fields of legal studies, Assyriology, and art history.^ That it was also highly esteemed during antiquity is evident in both its removal as booty to

3. Throughout this essay I use the Middle Chronology. 4. Conventionally, a distinction has been made between 'vision' as the physiological mechanism of sight

through the lens of the eye and 'visuality' as the psychological and socially contingent practice of seeing/viewing (Nelson 2000a: l -6 ; Bryson 1988:91-92; Foster 1988a:ix).

5. The monument is traditionally referred to as the 'Code of Hammurabi'; however, it is now widely accepted that these laws do not constitute a true 'law code' in the modern sense, but rather are part of a tradition of 'juridical scholarship' (Westbrook 2003:18; Rubio 2007:31-34). The bibliography is lengthy.

1 50 AGENCY AND IDENTITY IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST

Susa nearly 700 years after its creation and the continued copying of its text into the middle of the 1st millennium BCE as part of the scribal training tradition (André-Salvini 2003) . The stele, of highly polished black basalt standing over seven feet tall (225 cm), was erected late in Hammurabi's long reign (1792 -1750 BCE). Taking the shape of an elegantly elongated yet irregular stele, the monument's surface is primarily devoted to the exquisitely incised laws that embrace and support a figural representation at the top. This scene shows the sun god Shamash seated on a throne to the right, with archaizing sunrays rising from his shoulders. He extends the so-called rod and ring— emblems of authority—to Hammurabi who stands facing him. The congruence of the written laws, the sun god who is associated with just pronouncements, and the reference in the inscribed text to the 'King of Justice' has led to the general acceptance of this piece as a monumental statement of Hammurabi's projected kingly ideal as the divinely sanctioned upholder and dispenser of justice. While the monument offers potential for numerous different avenues of inquiry, in this essay I will limit my study to the carved figural scene and in particular to the formal, and I would argue agen-tive, relations it establishes between the two depicted figures, and with the viewer.

Figure 1. Detail of the Stele of Hammurabi, found at Susa. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

Listed here are just a few of the more recent references, which include earlier references: Andre-Salvini 2003; 2008:cat. no. 17; M. Richardson 2000; Roth 1997.


Figure 2. Detail of the Stele of Ur-Namma, found at Ur. Penn Museum object B16676, image #141417.

Within art historical discussions of the stele's carved scene,6 scholars frequently remark upon the directness of the relationship between Hammurabi and the god Shamash (Groenewegen-Frankfort 1987 :168 ; Frankfort 1996 :119 ; Winter 2000 :37 -38 ; Andre-Salvini 2 0 0 3 : 1 6 ; Schmandt-Besserat 2007 :94 -95 ; Bahrani 2008 :115) . The 'altars' and astral symbols that had been present between and above the two protagonists in earlier examples, such as the Stele of Ur-Namma, are absent, serving to close the space between the figures. Moreover, this space has literally been bridged so that the figures touch one another at the pivot point of the rod and the ring. With this comes a heightened immediacy of vision between the confronting profile faces of king and god. Other formal elements further emphasize the closeness. For example, a horizontal link is created through the line that runs across the waist of Shamash, along his bent left arm, and then his bent right arm, through the rod and ring to Hammurabi's left arm, which follows a horizontal line across his waist (Chau 2008:11) . Less mentioned but more significant in terms of my inquiry into the agentive nature of visual per-ception is the rendering of the divinity's headdress with true profile horns (Moortgat 1969 :85-86 ;

6. I use this rather artificial distinction to refer to studies of the figural representation in contrast tostudies that focus mainly on the inscription. A recent unpublished paper and talk by Stephanie Langin-Hooper (n.d., 2008) blurs this distinction in an innovative study of the text and image together.


Collon 1995:99) , which reinforces the close bond between king and god (Chau 2008) . We can add to the perspectival rendering of the horns the very high relief of the carving that accentuates a sense of volumetric mass existing in space (Moortgat 1969:87) . Henrietta Groenewegen-Frankfort pointed out in 1951—though no one since has mentioned it—that the profile faces of both Hammu-rabi and Shamash are carved so deeply that the eyes appear to be in true profile as is the horned headdress (on which she doesn't comment), which intensifies the reciprocity of sight between the two figures (1987:168 n. 1). These two techniques—profile horns (and eyes) and high relief—surely were deployed together because of their mutually reinforcing formal properties.

With the rendering of the horns in true profile, the headdress can be read as occupying the same space as the profile heads of the king and god in a coherent, unified manner. Such a depiction follows the logic of what is typically referred to as linear perspective, considered to have been fully perfected during the Italian Renaissance and described in Alberti's 1435 treatise De pictura. For Alberti, 'Painters should only seek to present the form of things seen on this [the picture's] plane as if it were of transparent glass. Thus the visual pyramid could pass through it, placed at a definite distance with definite lights and a definite position of center in space and a definite place in respect to the observer' (cited in Preziosi 1987:57) . In the early 20th century, Erwin Panofsky drew upon Alberti to describe perspective in his influential art historical treatise as,

.. .the capacity to represent a number of objects together with a part of the space around them in such a way that the conception of the material picture support is completely supplanted by the conception of a transparent plane through which we believe we are looking into an imaginary space (cited in Grootenboer 2005:164).

According to these definitions, perspective structures a geometric system with a vanishing or centric point in or beyond the art surface and the eye of the artist at the other end, both of which are understood as static and fixed (Jay 1988:6-7) .

Yet, before we return to the Stele of Hammurabi and its profile horns, it is important to recog-nize that for us (20th- and 21st-century scholars), perspective is more than just a mechanical means of depiction; it is also a mode of thinking, particularly its association with geometry and physics and by extension with truth—what James Elkins has called a metaphor for ordering our own percep-tions and subjectivities (Elkins 1994; Grootenboer 2005 :118-19) . As a structuring principle of thought (cf. Barrett 2000 :65) , the notion of Renaissance perspective has influenced profoundly the development of the discipline of art history from the 18 th through the 20th century of our era, such that all art has been either implicitly or explicitly analyzed through the rhetorical lens of perspective (Grootenboer 2005 :113-19 ; Preziosi 1987:57; Bordo 1987:62-68). In this way, 'perspectivism' has come to be inextricably linked with concepts of illusionism (in the sense of creating an illusion of reality) and mimesis, which serve as the measure of an artwork's quality (Elkins 1994 :11 ; Bahrani 2003:73-95) .

It is not surprising then that the sudden appearance of profile horns on a profile head in 18th-century BCE Mesopotamia should have been greeted with applause as a first step in attaining 'true' representational perspective. Thus, Anton Moortgat could write in 1969, 'we shall find a notable advance in Old Babylonian art in the treatment of perspective in two-dimensional art—namely that when the gods' heads were shown in profile their horned crowns were also shown in profile—and this advance can in all probability be dated at the end of Hammurabi's life' (1969:71) . It is worth quoting at length Moortgat's analysis (1969:85-86) :

Only when the artist has realized that the world of perception, felt by man with hand and seen by his eyes, is fundamentally an image of actual reality, a way of reflecting existence, can he strive in his art-form not merely to portray a symbol of things independent of their incidental shape, but rather to capture reality in a copy, which the eye can recognize as an image. We must assume that the spirit of


Hammurabi was approaching this stage when we see definite attempts at perspective suddenly appearing during this period... The sculptor is creating a completely new precedent, however, a first step towards perspective...

From such a teleological view point, inconsistencies of perspectival rendering, for example, that Hammurabi's robe clings to his arm rather than falling 'naturalistically', would be seen as 'incorrect' (Schmandt-Besserat 2007 :96) .

Figure 3. Drawing of inner panel of the Investiture Scene, found at Mari. After Parrot 1958:pl. XI.

We are, however, faced with a complicated situation. On the one hand, we can now reject evaluative judgments of the sort made by Moortgat, recognizing the fallacy of any teleological drive toward mimetic perspectivalism (Bahrani 2003). Yet on the other hand, we must still acknowledge and seek to explain this fundamental shift in the manner of rendering a three-dimensional object on an essentially two-dimensional surface. Are we dealing here with a unique masterpiece of


Hammurabi's that operated within its own reality? In fact this is not the case; rather it appears to be part of a broader sociocultural shift in the rendering of spatial perspective seen in other art objects, both monumental and small-scale. Furthermore, once this shift takes place, subsequent representa-tions conform to the new mode. The use of profile horns for a deity's headdress also appears on another monumental art work that has been dated to just prior to Hammurabi's stele: the so-called Investiture Scene wall painting at Mari (Figure 3). The Investiture Scene, a painting preserved on the wall of the courtyard just outside the throneroom of the palace at Mari, gets its name from the central image in which the goddess Ishtar extends the rod and ring to a standing ruler. This ruler is often identified as Zimri-Lim (1775-1762) , the last king of Mari before Hammurabi's conquest of the city in 1762, but the painting has recently been reattributed to an earlier ruler, Yahdun-Lim (ca. 1810-1794) . 7

Cylinder seals appear to follow the same general dating horizon in depicting horned headdresses in profile. Collon (1986:21) follows Moortgat in dating the use of profile horns on seals to the reign of Hammurabi. This chronological range, however, may be too narrow given the redating of the Investiture painting. She lists six examples (all unfortunately undated) in her catalogue of the British Museum's Old Babylonian seals (1986). One sealing on a tablet from Tell Harmal, dated to the tenth year of Ibal-pi-El II of Eshnunna (ca. 1778-1765) , a contemporary of Hammurabi, may show the seated god Tishpak—holding the rod and ring—with profile horns; however, without being able to examine the tablet itself (held in the Iraq Museum), it is difficult to say with certainty from the published photos and drawings (Otto 2000:no. 420 ; Werr 1988:no. 76a). Here, unlike Hammu-rabi's stele and the Investiture Scene from Mari, the god is more removed from the 'worshipper' who approaches through the mediation of a lesser deity. The worshipper, however, most likely is not the king Ibal-pi-El, but rather the seal owner named in the inscription as Tishpak-gimil. A care-ful study of datable seals might be revealing in terms of both chronology and the co-occurrence of profile horns with intimate scenes between the god and 'worshipper' but lies beyond the scope of the present paper.

Mould-made clay plaques provide another corpus of artistic production that shows the perspec-tival shift in the rendering of horns. Clay plaques as a genre of material cultural production in themselves are particularly numerous during the first centuries of the 2nd millennium, encompass-ing a wide range of imagery that includes deities, myths, music, 'everyday' scenes, and 'erotic' scenes (Barrelet 1968; Assante 2002) . Their production seems to have begun during the Ur III period (ca. 2 1 1 3 - 2 0 2 9 ) and virtually ceases at the end of the First Dynasty of Babylon (ca. 1595). While in general the plaques depict deities frontally, a few examples show profile gods and god-desses. An example from Tello shows a minor goddess in profile with a frontal horned headdress (Barrelet 1968 :no. 296) . Profile horned headdresses appear on plaques from Larsa (Barrelet 1968:no. 573) and Mashkan-shapir (Stone and Zimansky 2004 :91 , AbD 88-223) in the south and from Ishchali (Hill and Jacobsen 1990:pl. 35d) and Khafajah (Delougaz 1990:pl. 62a) in the Diyala. Unfortunately, within the Ur Ill-Old Babylonian span of production, it is rarely possible to provide more precise dates for the plaques. The Khafajah plaque of a god stabbing a cyclops might date to the 19th century; it was found in the Sin Temple of Mound D, which contained an archive contem-poraneous to the earliest rulers of the First Dynasty of Babylon, Sumu-abum and Sumu-la-El, in other words, the period of Isin's waning and Larsa's waxing power (Harris 1955). Mashkan-shapir,

7. The original excavator, Andre Parrot, dated the painting to the very end of Zimri-Lim's reign, a date also argued for by Moortgat on stylistic grounds. Recent réévaluation of the archaeological evidence, however, has suggested that the painting predates the Shamshi-Adad/Yasmah-Adad interregnum, and the current excavator Jean-Claude Margueron dates it to the reign of Yahdun-Lim at the end of the nineteenth or beginning of the 18th century BCE (Margueron 1990; 2004:509).

OBJECT AGENCY? 157

though occupied from at least Ur III times, saw its main urban growth during the late Isin-Larsa and early Old Babylonian periods, which might provide a general date in the late 19th or early 18th century for its plaque (Stone and Zimansky 2004:26-42).

Given the widespread occurrence of this perspectival shift, we might turn to the idea of a social history of seeing, suggesting that the 18th (and perhaps 19th) century represents a horizon for a new viewing mode, which emphasized a new model for rendering spatial relationships. What though is the significance of this new visuality? In this regard, it is helpful to consider the ways in which perspectivally rendered objects spin a web of connections between figures within and without the pictorial frame. The positioning of the viewer in relation to an image, as constructed through idealized Renaissance perspective schemes of unified form and theme, has been understood to create distance between viewer and artwork and has been associated with the emergence of the concept of the individual during the early Modern period (Nelson 2000a:5; Fowler 2004:12-13; Preziosi 1987:58; for Graeco-Roman art, see Eisner 2007:24). To cite Martin Jay (1988:8), 'The abstract coldness of the perspectival gaze meant the withdrawal of the painter's emotional entanglement with the objects depicted in geometricalized space. The participator involvement of more absorptive visual modes was diminished if not entirely suppressed, as the gap between spectator and spectacle widened'.

Yet at the same time, recent discussions of Renaissance perspective provide a useful avenue into how visual perception of spatial rendering can generate agency rather than disembodiment. Grootenboer (2005:121), discussing Hubert Damisch's Origin of Perspective, notes that the vanishing point determines the position of the viewer, not the other way around (see, for example, Damisch 1994:380). In this way, perspective gives meaning to the place of the viewer/subject within the artwork's established network; it 'anticipates possible ways of looking at it through its perspecti-val configuration' (Grootenboer 2005:10). Elkins (1994) notes that, while it is a misconception that perspective requires a single, motionless eye fixed on a vanishing point, it nevertheless does serve to constrain and limit the 'wandering' of the eye. As he puts it, perspective lines 'tug at the eye', capturing and directing it (Elkins 1994:176). Similarly, Donald Preziosi (1987:58) has described perspective as a system that 'incarnates' a viewer, stating that both viewer ('Subject') and artwork ('Object') are 'captured and fixed along the centric ray passing back and forth between point of view and vanishing point'. This concept was already acknowledged by Panofsky in 1927: 'Perspec-tive creates distance between human beings and things...; but then in turn it abolishes this distance by, in a sense, drawing this world of things, an autonomous world confronting the individual, into the eye' (1991:67). The dynamic relations that perspective establishes between the viewer and the artwork, as well as among the 'objects' depicted in the artwork, constitute a critical means of generating agency by entangling the viewer in the schemata of the art.

The spatial immediacy and profile horns seen on the Stele of Hammurabi's figural depiction surprisingly have rarely been analyzed together. The two scholars who note the profile horns— Moortgat and Collon—say next to nothing about the connotations derived from the two figures' placement. Moortgat (1969:85) goes so far as to state that the stele's subject matter is of no particu-lar interest. Collon (1995:99) says only that the relief had a profound impact on Mesopotamian art as evinced in similar reliefs found elsewhere. Those scholars who focus on the visual and commu-nicative relationship between Hammurabi and Shamash make no mention of the profile horns. I would argue, however, that the relationship of these two formal features—to each other and to the viewer—is fundamental to the generation of the monument's agency. And, indeed, it is the nexus of viewer-god-king that creates the dynamic space in which agency 'happens'. While the formal arrangement of the figures on the Stele of Hammurabi can be seen as an intensified relationship between god and ruler that simultaneously distances the viewer/subject, I argue that this distancing is not one of exclusion, but rather of dynamic interaction and positioning of the viewer, in effect an


agentive triangulation that mobilizes relations among the depicted subject, the object, and the viewing subject (see also Chau 2008).

In short, we have here with the Stele of Hammurabi not a leap of progress in the illusionist depiction of a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface, but a radical shift of viewing modes and the agentive relationships generated from them. There is, in fact, a tension created by the formal properties of the depiction of horned headdresses on figures with profile faces. On the one hand, the frontality of the earlier horned headdresses, such as on the Stele of Ur-Namma, might imply greater involvement with the viewer as do the frontal torsos, because they directly confront the audience; but, the profile faces of the figures mitigate this to some extent. The profile horns of the Stele of Hammurabi, on the other hand, could be seen to distance the viewer further, as is the generally accepted idea of perspective, while drawing the figures of Hammurabi and Shamash closer together in their mutual profiles turned toward one another, along with the other formal features noted above. Yet at the same time, the use of perspective to render objects in space insists on locat-ing the viewer within a spatial relationship with the artwork. Thus, the image of Hammurabi and Shamash draws the viewer in while at the same time establishing a distance between them. Such positioning could therefore be understood to heighten a viewer's awareness of his/her place in relation to the king and god by geometrically locating him/her in relation to it (for a similar argu-ment for the Renaissance period, see Bordo 1987:59-73). In this way, the monument acts to structure space both within and beyond the image and to generate an agentive force that constitutes subjects within a social hierarchy. This seemingly paradoxical drawing in while setting apart of the viewer is further accentuated by the placement of the image at the top of the stele above the eye-level of the viewer. Likewise, the archaizing rotation of the inscribed text ninety degrees so that it flows vertically pulls the viewers' eyes up the monument to the image and beyond, connecting viewer, earth, stele, temple (in front of which the stele would have been erected), and heaven (Langin-Hooper n.d.).8

The dynamic relationship of viewer to stele is also established in the content of the text inscribed on the monument. Hammurabi's special and intimate relationship with Shamash is clearly set forth in the prologue: 'Hammurabi, the pious prince, who venerates the gods, to make justice prevail in the land, to abolish the wicked and the evil, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, to rise like the sun-god Shamash over all humankind, to illuminate the land' (i 28-49, translation Roth 1997:76-77, my italics). Here, Hammurabi directly equates himself with Shamash, placing himself on par with the god as he does in the figural representation. This is a common literary trope at least as early as the Ur III period (Polonsky 2002:437, 485-92, 504-10) and might not warrant special mention except that the viewer is also brought into the relationship in the epilogue: 'Let a wronged man who has a lawsuit come before my image, the just king [or "the king of justice"], and have my inscribed stele read out loud to him; let him hear my precious words, let my stele reveal to him the matter. Let him see his case; let it soothe his heart...' (xlviii 3-19, translation Slanski 2003:261, my italics). Just as the perspectival rendering of space locates the viewer as a distant but present participant in the scene, so the text positions the viewer who is both to hear and see (have revealed to him) the monument. Moreover, the text continues with the specific words that the viewer is meant to say in praise of Hammurabi and a command for him to pray on behalf of Hammurabi. It then presents similar admonishments for future viewers, extending the agency of the monument beyond any 'present' into a 'future' (see the following section of the epilogue, xlviii 59-94, and for a related discussion, Slanski 2003:265).

Can we then understand the perspectival shift seen on the Stele of Hammurabi as part of a process of configuring new subjectivities in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia, and not just those of the

8 . For a recent discussion on the rotation of script, see Studevent-Hickman 2007.


king and god but in particular those of the viewers who are implicated by the stele?9 Grootenboer (2006 :506 n. 17), in regard to 18th-century CE European miniature eye paintings, poses the question of whether ruptures in the social fabric generate new modes of visuality. Might we, having encountered a radically new mode of visuality on the Stele of Hammurabi and elsewhere, postulate something similar for 18th-century BCE Mesopotamia? Or might it in fact be less unidirectional, that is, can we see new modes of visuality as participating in the coming into being of new subjectiv-ities and new social fabrics at one and the same time? The text literally constitutes the viewer as a 'subject' of the king and as one who is to respond to the monument in quite specific ways. But is this something new? Or better put, how is this particular constitution of the subject—since presumably such constitutive acts would be at the center of any political representation—new? To answer this, we need to look at other aspects of the Old Babylonian period to see what, if any, social ruptures with previous times there might have been.

Object Agency and the Fashioning of the Old Babylonian Subject

The most striking difference between the Old Babylonian period (including the Isin-Larsa periods of the 20th and 19th centuries) and that preceding it (the Ur III period) is the rise of the Amorite dynasties throughout Syria and Mesopotamia at cities such as Babylon, Mari, and Eshnunna. Indeed, in a recent political history of the first four centuries of the 2nd millennium, Dominique Charpin argues for calling this the 'Amorite Period' (Charpin 2004 :38) . Certainly, the designation Old Babylonian is problematic, particularly in the years before Hammurabi's unification of southern Mesopotamia. Yet as Norman Yoffee (2007) has posed in a review of Charpin's proposal, what does this 'ethnic' shift actually entail? Although we can identify these Amorite rulers by their non-Akkadian names, and they often take titles that signal their tribal Amorite heritage (Charpin 2 0 0 4 : 3 8 ; Jahn 2007), they do not appear to assert other strongly marked expressions of a uniquely Amorite identity (Yoffee 2007 ; see also Feldman 2007 :58) . Moreover, the Amorite dynasties established themselves immediately following the collapse of the Ur III state around 2 0 0 0 BCE, predating the perspectival shift of the 18th century by around two hundred years.

We might also consider the role of law in constituting subjects. Zainab Bahrani (2008) has recently proposed this as the central and defining aspect of Hammurabi's stele, linking it to the core social identity of the state's subjects. Martha Roth (1997:2) argues for the close relationship estab-lished by the 'historical-literary' prologues and epilogues of the law collections (belonging to Ur-Namma/Shulgi of Ur, ca. 2100 ; Lipit-Ishtar of Isin, ca. 1930; the laws of Eshnunna, ca. 1770; and Hammurabi) to relate the laws to the role of the king as divinely sanctioned judge. She notes that it is probably no coincidence that the very first legal provisions listed in Hammurabi's laws address the consequences of false accusations in the political realm and establish the state's right to impose the death penalty (Roth 1997:2) . Yet the public and monumental expression of royal law collections cannot fully explain the representational shift, since such laws date back to the time of Ur-Namma and his stele with frontally oriented horned headdresses.

Could our explanation lie instead in the shift from a city-state oriented concept of governance to more of a territorial state, which Marc Van de Mieroop (2004:39) suggests is the main legacy of Hammurabi's lengthy rule? The last ten years of Hammurabi's reign, during which the stele was erected, witnessed the consolidation of his newly acquired territorial state (Charpin 2003 :13) . In this light, it is not surprising to find, in the prologue of the law collection, a politically motivated grouping of place names that map over his kingdom both spatially and chronologically (Charpin

9. Identifying 'subjects' has its own set of challenges and risks. For a recent discussion of some of these, see Smith 2004.


2003 :104-5) . The consolidation of a large and diverse group of lands must have presented increas-ing challenges to Hammurabi's governance (as well as to his peers and rivals in Eshnunna, Mari, and Aleppo, who were also attempting to expand their territorial states). The moulding of subjects within this new state would have been of central importance in this endeavor. As has already been noted, the idea of fashioning the state subject would not be anything new in the Old Babylonian period; certainly this is central and fundamental to most royally sponsored visual arts and would have been a preoccupation for earlier states, including those of extensive territories such as the Ur III and Akkadian states. Nonetheless, the particular means by which this was accomplished could vary by time and place, and it seems that it is to the particularities of governing and administering that we should turn.

During the Old Babylonian period a newly complex socioeconomic dynamic in the relationships between institutions and individuals emerged that would have both required and produced new subject identities. The economic situation in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia is particularly well represented in our surviving textual corpus, perhaps indicative of its relevance within Old Babylo-nian society itself.10 From this documentation, we can reconstruct (with more or less confidence) the complicated interweaving of the three traditional Mesopotamian economic sectors—the palace, the temple, and the private/community sector—in ways that diverged from previous periods (Renger 2000 , 2007 ; Stol 2004 ; Goddeeris 2007) . Indeed, it is often difficult to disentangle these sectors (Goddeeris 2007 :204) . Nearly all private individuals whose documents survive were in one way or another involved with the palace or temple as officials, entrepreneurs, or prebend holders. Seen from the reverse angle, this might be called a partial 'privatization' of the economy, especially at the level of the palace (Van de Mieroop 2007:93-94) .

The institution of temple prebends, by which office holders received renumeration for their ser-vices, first surfaced in Ur III times, but in the Old Babylonian period the practice became extremely complicated as offices were subject to increasing fragmentation through hereditary division and the selling of vanishingly small shares (Postgate 1992 :125 ; van Driel 2005) . On an everyday level, the fragmentation of prebends served to multiply, complicate, and even diffuse the bonds between personnel and the temple itself. Both temples and especially palaces contracted non-dependent individuals to manage their institutions' economic activities, while the palaces attempted to redirect temple surpluses to themselves (Goddeeris 2007 :204) . In the case of the palace, the leasing and contracting of economic activity—both in the production and administration spheres—out of the institution to private individuals or entrepreneurs allowed the palace to escape the cost of maintain-ing permanent personnel and transferred risk to the entrepreneur, whose increasing debt burden required the periodic erasure of debts through a royal edict (misarum) (Renger 2000 ; Charpin 2000 ; Stol 2004 :919-44 ; Goddeeris 2007). These reconfigurations of the relationships between the palace and society displaced more subjects from a position of actual dependency on the institution, in effect distancing the subject from the palace, while at the same time broadening the socioeco-nomic networks external but nevertheless connected to the palace.

While varying degrees of remove and connectedness between the palace and independent households characterize the Old Babylonian period in general, the uniqueness of the important role played by the private element stands out. Though it is difficult to chart accurately the diachronic and geographic ebbing and flowing of these relationships—perhaps to be reduced to greater private involvement at the beginning in northern Babylonia (Goddeeris 2002) , with increasing palace

10. One must, however, be cautious in generalizing about widespread social and economic systems due to the spotty coverage of the surviving documents, the nature of literacy in general in Mesopotamia, and archaeological happenstance (see, e.g., Postgate 1992:292; S. Richardson 2002:13; Stone 2002; Stol 2004:644).


control in the middle Old Babylonian period under the rulers of Larsa and Hammurabi, and then once again an increase back in the direction of outsourced activities (Yoffee 1977; Ellis 1976; S. Richardson 2002)—they mark a fundamental and distinctive component in any attempts at royal territorial control. If then there was an unprecedented independence from both palace and temple during the Old Babylonian period, one might expect also a growing concern on the part of 'expan-sionist' rulers like Hammurabi to establish the proper relations between the state and its subjects.

Without attributing any directional cause and effect, I suggest that the changing mode of seeing, documented in the arts, went arm-in-arm with the reconfiguring of private-royal relationships. This may sound like a radical conclusion, but one that I would suggest is fully in line with my contention of object agency and the participation of new modes of visuality in the constitution of new subjec-tivities. It is important here to note, however, that this does not appear to be a rupture—there remain strong continuities with earlier arts and cultic traditions—and in fact these continuities would have been critical in any centralized royal propaganda that sought to overcome the growing lack of state control that the evolving economic system included. Nonetheless, we can connect the radically new formal properties seen in the figural depiction on the top of Hammurabi's stele—the unified perspectival rendering of the figures in space that engages with the viewer while also locat-ing him/her in the distance—as a prime agent in the constitution of royal subjects. As such, Hammurabi's stele stands as an exemplar of how formal properties of visual representation and perception generate agency in their relationship with their viewers; in the process of engagement, the viewer is becoming the king's subject as he/she situates him/herself in response to—and is situated by—the stele. In this light, then, the object agency of Hammurabi's stele can be understood as operating as a central component in the fashioning of the 'subject' that found expression in new ways of seeing the relationship between subject and king.

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