ABSTRACT
In recent years, Alfred GelPs scholarship has provided the greatest stimulus for discussions regarding object agency, and in particular that of objects that Geli calls art due to their formal complexity and technical accomplishment. In GelPs conception, art objects act as secondary agents in conjunction with specific human associates; they acquire agency when enmeshed in social relationships. Visual perception of spatial relationships is one particularly strong force in the dynamic enmeshment of art object and viewer and thus can be considered participatory or agentive with respect to both object and audience. It explores how a specific visuality of spatial relations, materialized in the perspectivai rendering on Hammurabi's stele, served as an agent in the fashioning 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.
