La testa di rame dal tempio di Ishtar a Ninive e l’affermazione della regalità accadica

The copper head of a sovereign found by the archaeologists of the British Museum during the excavation of the Temple of Ishtar on the citadel of Quyunjik at Nineveh in 1931, and now kept in the Iraq Museum at Baghdad (I.M. 11331), was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of Akkadian art. Countless studies have described its stylistic and iconographic characteristics. This article, through a complete analysis of the context of discovery, of iconographic and stylistic comparisons and also of the technological aspects of the work, proposes its attribution to the Akkadian royal workshops during the reign of the second successor and son of Sargon, Manishtusu, and identifies with the same sovereign, founder of the Akkadian dynasty and initiator of the visual propaganda typical of this kingdom, the represented personage.