Does the Victory Stele of Naram-Sin show ancient astronauts, a UFO, or giants among the Akkadians?

The Victory Stele of Naram-Sin (Louvre, c. 2250 BC) commemorates the Akkadian king's defeat of the Lullubi people of the Zagros mountains. Ancient-astronaut programming has claimed the cone-shaped object above Naram-Sin's head is a rocket or spacecraft, and that the disks near it are UFOs. Neither claim survives close examination of the object itself or of comparable Mesopotamian art. The 'cone' is a horned tiara: a crown format that, up to this stele, only gods were shown wearing in Akkadian art. Naram-Sin is the first Akkadian king depicted wearing it, matching the historical record that he was the first Mesopotamian king to take a divine determinative before his own name in official inscriptions, formally declaring himself a god. The object has no features consistent with a vehicle (no covering for the head or face, no mechanical structure) and is stylistically identical to the divine horned crowns worn by gods on dozens of other Akkadian and later Mesopotamian reliefs and cylinder seals. The disks above the scene are the sun and a star, a standard convention in Mesopotamian royal art signaling divine favor and blessing on the king's victory; the same convention shows up repeatedly on other steles and seals from the period, which is difficult to square with each one supposedly depicting a distinct alien spacecraft.

What the ancient-astronaut reading actually stumbles into, without realizing it, is a real and well-documented feature of ancient Near Eastern religion: divine kingship and the iconography of a king's relationship to the divine council. This is core subject matter in Michael Heiser's scholarship: his doctoral work and The Unseen Realm both address how ANE monarchies across Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Ugarit positioned their kings relative to the gods, sometimes as the chosen vice-regent of the high god presiding over a divine council, and, in unusual cases like Naram-Sin's, as claiming outright membership among the gods. Symbols like the horned crown and the star/sun disk are exactly the kind of royal-divine iconography Heiser catalogued as part of the broader ANE divine-council backdrop that biblical scholarship uses to read texts like Psalm 82, where God 'stands in the divine assembly' to judge 'the gods,' and Deuteronomy 32:8-9, where the nations are allotted to members of that same council while Israel belongs to Yahweh directly. Naram-Sin's stele is, in that light, a textbook example of the very royal self-deification the biblical writers were polemicizing against (a human king appropriating divine council imagery for himself), which is a documented, mainstream point of ANE-studies and Heiser scholarship, not a claim that the Bible mentions Naram-Sin by name. Read against that real background, the stele needs no aliens: it needs exactly what the historical record already says it is, a conqueror asserting he outranks the gods of the people he just defeated.