Sargon and the Akkadian Empire

The story

The baby in the basket

A story, written on Assyrian tablets of the 7th century BC but probably older, begins like this: “I am Sargon, the mighty king, the king of Akkad. My mother was a priestess, my father I did not know.” The mother, the text tells, secretly put the newborn into a basket of reeds, sealed it with bitumen and entrusted it to the river. The water carried it to a man who was drawing water for the gardens, Akki, who took the child in and raised him as his son. Then the goddess Ishtar fell in love with the boy and gave him the kingdom.

If you feel you have heard this story before, you are right: it is very like that of Moses in the Book of Exodus. Scholars do not know whether it is a very ancient tale or a legend built centuries later to make Sargon a man of destiny. What we know with more certainty is that a man, not of royal origin, around 2334 BC took power in Mesopotamia and invented a new way of governing.

From cupbearer to king

His name, Sharru-kin, probably means “the king is legitimate” or “true king”: a name for a usurper, chosen by someone who has no right to the throne and wants people to believe he has. According to tradition he was cupbearer to Ur-Zababa, king of the city of Kish. Then he rebelled, founded a new city, Akkad (in Akkadian Agade), and made himself king. He spoke and wrote in Akkadian, a Semitic language different from Sumerian, and this explains the name of the empire.

The next step was to conquer the south, where the ancient Sumerian cities lay. Sargon defeated Lugalzaggesi, king of Uruk, who had for a time united many cities under himself. According to his inscriptions he led him in chains to the gate of the temple at Nippur. Then he tore down the walls of the conquered cities and put men he trusted in charge of them, in place of the local kings. These were no longer alliances or confederations of cities, but a single central power.

From the “lower sea” to the “upper sea”

The inscriptions say that Sargon conquered everything, from the “lower sea” (the Persian Gulf) to the “upper sea” (the Mediterranean). In his years of rule, which tradition says were fifty-six, his armies reached Syria, the Taurus mountains and Elam, in Iran. One text tells that at his quay at Akkad ships from Meluhha (the Indus valley), Magan (Oman) and Dilmun (Bahrain) docked: it is a sign that the empire controlled the trade routes. Not all the conquests are well documented, and some accounts were exaggerated in later times.

To govern so vast a territory new rules were needed. Sargon appointed governors and officials, often chosen from among his relatives, introduced common weights and measures and made Akkadian the language of administration, beside Sumerian. He kept a standing army: the inscriptions say that every day five thousand four hundred soldiers ate at his table. After him his sons Rimush and Manishtushu reigned, and then his grandson Naram-Sin, who had himself called “king of the four quarters of the world” and was portrayed as a god.

The first woman author in history

Sargon sent his daughter Enheduanna to Ur as high priestess of the Moon god Nanna. It was a political choice: a king's daughter in the most important temple of the south tied the new dynasty to the old Sumerian traditions. Enheduanna did more. She wrote hymns, in Sumerian, to the temples and to the goddess Inanna, among them the “Exaltation of Inanna”, in which she speaks in the first person: “I, Enheduanna...”. She is the first author whose name we know, and her works were copied in schools for over five hundred years. Her portrait is on a limestone disc found at Ur by the archaeologist Leonard Woolley in 1927 and now kept in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.

The end of the empire

The empire of Akkad lasted almost two centuries. Under the last kings revolts and invasions began, by the Gutians, a people from the Zagros mountains. Many scholars think that a period of drought and poor harvests around 2200 BC contributed, but this explanation is debated. A Sumerian poem, “The Curse of Akkad”, tells of the fall of the city as punishment from the gods for an offence by Naram-Sin. Akkad was abandoned, and today we do not even know where it stood: it is one of the most famous capitals of the ancient world and has still not been found, perhaps hidden under the fields of central Iraq.

A doubt to remember

To say “the first empire in history” is convenient, but it is not entirely exact. Before Sargon there had been powerful kings, such as Lugalzaggesi, and Egypt had been a united kingdom for centuries. Akkad's is considered the first empire because it united peoples with different languages, Sumerians and Akkadians, under a single ruler, and was not limited to one valley.