This article focuses on Narâm-Sîn's military achievement and the oracular consultation connected with it, which formed a long commemorative tradition in Mesopotamia between the eighteenth and third centuries BC. This lengthy process preserved and disseminated the memory of the king's achievement, revealing a series of transformations in the oracle questions and their interpretation. Diviners and scribes played a key role in these dynamics of memory construction and legitimization of the facts. By examining the development of this historiography through the few sources available, one can see how the Mesopotamians came to acknowledge the past as a supply of experiences that afforded a better understanding of the present.
Mesopotamia ; oracular consultation; Narâm-Sîn ; memory ; historiography