Akkadian Empire

Sargon

Drafted from Foster, The Age of Agade: Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia (2016)formation

The name is not a name. Sharru-kin means "the king is legitimate" or "the true king", and a ruler who has to say that in his own throne-name is telling you something about how he got there.

The legend says he was a gardener's foster-son, set adrift as a baby in a reed basket sealed with bitumen and drawn out of the river — a story that reaches the Hebrew Bible in another form a millennium and a half later — and rose to be cupbearer to the king of Kish before taking the throne himself. The text that records it is centuries later than Sargon and is a literary composition, not a document; what it establishes is that the tradition remembered him as a man without a claim.

What he did is better attested. Around 2334 BC, by the conventional chronology, he took the Sumerian city-states of the south — Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Umma — and then kept going: north up the Euphrates towards Syria, east into Elam and the Zagros. He ruled it from a capital called Akkad, which has never been located, and which nobody has ever found.

Akkad is where the written history of empire begins, and it begins with two problems that never entirely go away.

The dates are the first. The chronology of the third millennium is a reconstruction with an uncertainty of roughly a century in either direction — Assyriologists work with a high, middle and low chronology and the middle one is a convention rather than a finding. Every date given for Sargon is a convention, and it is worth saying so once rather than implying a precision nobody has.

The second is the figure of 650,000 square kilometres. Setting that beside the Mongol empire's twenty-four million is arithmetically simple and historically empty. The share of the world under any state's control in 2300 BC is a different quantity from the same area in 1300 AD.

The first, conventionally

Drafted from Foster, The Age of Agade: Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia (2016)expansion

The state Sargon built this way lasted roughly a hundred and eighty years.

It is conventionally called the first empire, and the qualifier matters: it is first by a definition — one authority ruling multiple previously independent polities of different language and identity, through appointed officials rather than tribute — that was constructed afterwards, partly to make it first. What is not in doubt is that it was treated as the precedent. Mesopotamian kings for the next two thousand years described themselves in Sargon's terms, and Naram-Sin's claim to divinity and to the title king of the four quarters were reused for centuries.

What it was in institutional terms is the substance of the record. Sargon appointed his own men as governors in the cities he took rather than leaving their rulers in place under tribute; he installed his daughter Enheduanna as high priestess of the moon god at Ur, which is a political appointment to a religious office of a kind rulers went on making for the next four thousand years; and he kept, by his own inscriptions, five thousand four hundred men who ate before him daily.

I am Enheduanna

Drafted from Foster, The Age of Agade: Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia (2016)aside?What aside means

Sargon's appointment of his own daughter as high priestess of the moon god at Ur was, by itself, an ordinary act of statecraft — a political office dressed as a religious one, of a kind rulers went on installing relatives in for the next four thousand years. What makes Enheduanna worth a chapter of her own is not the appointment. It is what she is recorded as having done with it.

A name attached to a voice

A body of Sumerian religious poetry survives naming her as its author, including hymns to the temples of forty-two cities and a longer composition known from its opening words, Nin-me-sara — "The Exaltation of Inanna" — in which the narrator describes being driven from her office by a rebel who seized power at Ur, and appeals to the goddess Inanna to restore her. Partway through, the text names its own speaker directly:

I am the high priestess, I am Enheduanna.

No comparable moment survives from anywhere earlier in the written record. Royal inscriptions before this point speak in a king's voice about a king's deeds, composed by scribes who leave no trace of their own identity. This is a named individual, describing her own situation in her own first person, in a text copied for well over a thousand years afterward — well over a hundred manuscript copies survive from schools at Nippur, Ur and elsewhere, most of them centuries later than Enheduanna's own lifetime.

What the ground gave back

Confirmation that a person by this name actually held the office comes from outside the poetry entirely. Leonard Woolley, excavating at Ur in 1927, recovered a broken alabaster disk that names her directly: "wife of Nanna, daughter of Sargon," standing in a scene of worship. Seals bearing her name and title were found alongside it. Whoever wrote the poetry, somebody named Enheduanna certainly held this office, in this city, in this reign — the disk fixes the person to the record independently of whatever is claimed about her pen.

What is not settled

Whether Enheduanna herself composed the works copied in her name is disputed, and the terms of the dispute are worth stating rather than smoothing over. The surviving manuscripts are Old Babylonian school copies, made several centuries after she would have lived, with none of the linguistic traces an original Old Sumerian composition would show. Some Assyriologists treat the attribution as essentially reliable; others argue that naming a text after a revered figure of the deep past was itself a way of investing it with authority, regardless of who actually composed it centuries closer to when the copies were made.

Both readings agree on the same underlying fact, which is what actually matters here: within a few centuries of Sargon's reign, Mesopotamian scribal tradition had settled on his daughter, by name, as the person a major body of temple poetry belonged to — the first time authorship of that kind attaches to anyone, real claim or invented one, anywhere in the written record.

The obelisk of Manishtushu

Drafted from King, A History of Sumer and Akkad (1910)aside?What aside means

De Morgan's first season at Susa, in the winter of 1897-8, turned up a four-sided block of stone carrying sixty-nine columns of Akkadian. It is not a victory monument and not a law code. It is a property deed, and it belongs to Sargon's son.

What it records

Each face of the obelisk deals with one tract of farmland. The first is the Field of Baz, three estates near the city of Dur-Sin; the second the Field of Baraz-sirim, near Kish, which was Manishtushu's capital; the third three estates together called the Marsh of Ninkharsag, near Marad; the fourth the fields of Shad-Bitkim and Zimanak near a city whose name is still uncertain.

The text is enormous because of what it insists on recording. For every estate it gives the size, the value and the position. It names every proprietor the land was bought from, with their parentage. It names the associates who held an interest — mostly relatives who had put capital into cultivating or improving the ground. It names the overseers who were dispossessed, and the overseers installed in their place, and repeats the incoming names on all four faces before the purchase formula.

Bought, not taken

The thing worth noticing, and the reason a document like this exists at all, is that the king did not confiscate.

He bought. The area of each estate was measured first. Its value was reckoned in grain and then converted to silver at a fixed rate — one bur of land counted as sixty gur of grain, or one mana of silver. On top of the purchase price the owners were paid a further tenth, or three-twentieths. And beyond that they received presents from the king — animals, garments, vessels — scaled according to the recipient's rank and to how large a share of the property had been theirs.

King's summary is that Manishtushu acquired the land legally, as though he were merely a private citizen or large land-owner.

That is a considerable statement about the first empire. A king who could certainly have taken the fields instead assembled a royal estate across four cities by measured valuation, above-market payment, compensation to secondary interest-holders and a written record naming every party — and then had the whole transaction carved on stone and set up in a temple, which is what you do with a document you want to remain enforceable after you are dead.

Where it was found

It was not found in Babylonia. It was at Susa, because the Elamites carried it there as plunder.

They took Hammurabi's law stele in the same way, and it was dug up on the same site. The two most informative Mesopotamian monuments about how a state handled property and justice both survive because a foreign army thought them worth stealing, and both re-entered the world through French excavations in Iran within four years of each other.

There is no version of Mesopotamian history that is not partly a history of what Elam took.

The great revolt

Drafted from Foster, The Age of Agade: Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia (2016)peak

Naram-Sin inherited an empire built in two generations by his grandfather and his uncle, and very nearly lost the whole of it in his first years on the throne. A copper statue base found at Bassetki, north of where Akkad itself is thought to have stood, carries his own account of what happened, cut in a tone closer to relief than triumph:

Naram-Sin, the mighty, king of Agade: when the four quarters together revolted against him, through the love which the goddess Ishtar showed him, he was victorious in nine battles in one year, and the kings whom they had raised against him, he captured.

Who rose, and against what

This was not a border rebellion or a single disaffected governor. Later copies of the events, and the inscriptions of the campaign itself, name a coalition drawn from across the length of the empire's Mesopotamian core: Iphur-Kish, a king raised up at Kish; Amar-Girid, raised at Uruk; a rebel leader at Nippur; and cities further out — Kutha, Sippar, Kazallu among them — joining what the inscriptions describe as "the four quarters," the same phrase Akkadian kingship used to describe the whole world it claimed to rule, turned back against the throne that claimed it.

Whatever the precise trigger, the shape of the crisis is legible without one: a young king, newly succeeded to a throne two men before him had built and held for barely two generations combined, faced nearly every major city his family had conquered rising at once rather than waiting to test him individually. An empire that recent had no deep reservoir of habitual obedience to draw on. It had only the army Sargon and his sons had built, and whether that army would hold for a third ruler in a row was, in these opening years, a genuinely open question.

Nine battles, one year

It did hold. Naram-Sin's own count — nine battles fought and won within a single year, the rebel kings taken captive rather than left to regroup — is the kind of claim royal inscriptions routinely inflate, but nothing in the aftermath suggests exaggeration on the scale that would matter: no second rising is recorded, no lost city stays lost, and Naram-Sin goes on to reign for another three and a half decades over a state that, by every later measure, is more secure rather than less.

The revolt outlived its own suppression in a different way. Old Babylonian scribes centuries later were still copying literary accounts of it — Naram- Sin and the Enemy Hordes, a text describing a coalition of seventeen kings massed against him — numbers and details growing with retelling in exactly the way a single dramatic year of survival tends to, once it has had a thousand years to become a story rather than a memory.

The king who became a god

Drafted from Foster, The Age of Agade: Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia (2016)peak

Sargon's grandson Naram-Sin ruled for about thirty-seven years, and the empire is at its height under him for two reasons, one military and one without precedent anywhere.

The military reason is the revolt he put down in the opening years of his reign, at the cost of nine battles fought in a single year. What matters here is what came after it. The citizens of Akkad, according to an inscription he had cut, asked the gods to make Naram-Sin the god of their city, and the gods agreed. He began writing his own name with the divine determinative — the cuneiform sign that marks a word as the name of a god — and in the great victory stele now in the Louvre he climbs a mountain over his defeated enemies wearing the horned crown, which no king had worn before because it belonged to gods.

Rulers claiming a sanction from above are ordinary: the mandate of heaven, divine kingship, a claim to be the awaited imam. All of those locate the authority somewhere else and route it through the king. Naram-Sin's version is that the king is the thing above.

He also took the title king of the four quarters, meaning the whole world, and that title and the divine determinative were both reused by Mesopotamian rulers for the next two thousand years. The Achaemenid formula "by the favour of Ahuramazda I am king" is the opposite move, made by people who knew this one; the Neo-Assyrian kings campaigning as the vice-regents of Ashur. The Akkadian innovation was the maximal version, and nobody in Mesopotamia went that far again.

The empire reached its widest under him — from the Gulf to the Mediterranean and into Anatolia, by the claims of the inscriptions, which are claims — and it began coming apart under his son.

A capital nobody can find

Drafted from Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC (2015)aside?What aside means

Akkad, the city the empire is named for and ruled from, has never been located. It is mentioned constantly in Mesopotamian texts for two thousand years and no excavation has identified it; the likeliest explanations are that it lies under alluvium, or under a later city, somewhere near modern Baghdad.

That absence sets the terms for everything else. The dynasty is known from royal inscriptions, from administrative tablets at other sites, and from later literary tradition — including a Sumerian composition written a century or more after the fall, which turns the empire's collapse into a story about divine punishment. What that story explains, and what else has been proposed in its place, is a question worth taking up properly once the fall itself is being told; the point to establish here is only that a text this late, and this interested in making a theological argument, is nevertheless one of the main narrative sources for what happened.

So the capital is a place nobody can point at and the dates carry a century of slack. That is the evidential position for the first empire in history, and it is worth stating plainly rather than writing around, because everything asserted about Akkad rests on it.

The curse of Agade

Drafted from Foster, The Age of Agade: Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia (2016)end

Shar-kali-sharri, Naram-Sin's son, spent his reign fighting on every frontier at once and after him the king-list records a period it summarises with a question: who was king, who was not king? Akkad held a shrinking territory for another half-century under rulers about whom almost nothing is known, and around 2154 BC it stops.

Nobody conquered Akkad. It came apart rather than falling to anyone, and there are three explanations in circulation for how, none of which excludes the others.

The first is the Gutians, a people from the Zagros, whom the Mesopotamian tradition blames comprehensively. The blame is worth discounting: "Gutian" in later Mesopotamian writing functions as a general term for highland barbarians and is applied to almost anyone from that direction, and the evidence that they brought the empire down rather than moved into a vacuum is thin.

The second is the Curse of Agade, a Sumerian literary composition written a century or more afterwards, which explains the fall as divine punishment: Naram-Sin, denied a favourable omen, sacked the temple of Enlil at Nippur, and Enlil brought the Gutians down on him. It is one of the principal narrative sources for this period and it is theology about a political event, composed by people with their own reasons, and it is almost certainly wrong about Naram-Sin, who is well attested as a builder of temples including that one.

The third is climate. A sharp arid episode around 2200 BC — the 4.2 kiloyear event — is argued from sediment cores in the Gulf of Oman and elsewhere, and coincides with disruption across the region. The correlation is real. The causal claim is contested, the dating is not precise enough to tie it to a reign, and the same event has been used to explain collapses in Egypt and the Indus at the same time, which is either a significant finding or a sign that a single explanation is doing too much work.

No single cause is named here because none can be, honestly, from what survives: naming one would mean choosing between three arguments the scholarship itself has not closed.

What Akkad left is the precedent. Every later Mesopotamian ruler who wanted to describe a large state described it in Sargon's terms; his titles, his grandson's divinity, and the memory of a single authority over the whole land were still being invoked when Nabonidus dug for Naram-Sin's foundation deposits seventeen hundred years later. The empire lasted about a hundred and eighty years and remained useful to other people for two thousand.

Who, then, was Sargon?

Drafted from King, A History of Sumer and Akkad (1910)afterlife

For most of the time since Akkad fell, Sargon existed only as a story.

The empire collapsed around 2150 BC. The name survived in Mesopotamian writing for another two thousand years, but what survived was not a record of a reign; it was a body of legend, omen and moral literature about a king who had once ruled the world, copied and recopied by scribes who had never seen an Akkadian inscription and who were working a millennium and a half after the events.

How he came back

Leonard King, writing in 1910 as keeper of the Babylonian antiquities at the British Museum, sets out the recovery in order, and the order is the point.

Sargon's name turned up first in explanatory religious and astrological texts from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh — a figure in Assyrian heroic mythology, called king of justice and proclaimer of favours. In 1867 Rawlinson announced the famous Legend of Sargon, in which the king tells his own birth and boyhood in the first person, and made the shrewd suggestion that the Assyrian king Sargon, Sennacherib's father, may have been styled "the later Sargon" to distinguish him from a hero of romance whose adventures were better known to Assyrians than any history. George Smith translated the Legend in 1872, and with it the Omens of Sargon and Naram-Sin — a genre in which a great king's career is boiled down to a list of portents and their outcomes.

All of that is later tradition. The first object actually made in Sargon's own kingdom to reach a museum with a royal name on it came much later: a cylinder seal belonging to one of his officials, described in 1877, and then in 1883 a mace-head dedicated at the temple of Shamash at Sippar, which King calls the first actual inscription of that king to be found.

Two and a half thousand years of reputation, and then a piece of stone.

The argument King could not settle

And then the awkwardness, which he states without flinching.

The contemporary inscriptions gave a royal name that was read at the time as Shar-Gani-sharri. Whether that man was the Sargon of the legends was disputed throughout the period King is describing. One scholar read the name differently again and put him in the nineteenth century, three hundred years too late, and took him for an earlier king of Akkad altogether. Others assumed the identification as certain "in spite of some dissentients". Naram-Sin, by contrast, presented no difficulty at all: his name was on a vase found at Babylon and lost afterwards in the Tigris, and matched what Nabonidus had written about him.

So the position in 1910, sixty years into the study of Mesopotamia, was that Naram-Sin was solid and his grandfather might be two people.

The first archaeologist

The other thread in that paragraph is the one worth ending on.

The reason Naram-Sin's identification was secure is that Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, had dug for his foundation deposit in the sixth century BC and recorded what he found, including a date. He was excavating a building that was already seventeen hundred years old when he came to it, in order to restore it properly, and his inscription is one of the reasons a nineteenth-century Englishman could put a number on an Akkadian king.

That is the actual afterlife of Akkad. Not a successor state — nothing succeeded it — but a permanent position in other people's understanding of what a king is for, maintained by scribes copying omens, by a Babylonian antiquarian digging in his own ruins, and finally by philologists arguing over whether the man in the legend and the man on the mace-head were the same person.