No. 156
Sargon of Akkad
- Where
- Akkad
- Culture
- Akkad
- Lived
- reigned 2334-2279 BCE
- Why they matter
- Built what is often called the first empire.
- Fate
- His empire fell about a century after him.
Lyra Kael can take you here on the globe, tell you the story out loud and answer your questions. Start the time jump.
Background
Sargon of Akkad (; Akkadian: 𒊬𒊒𒄀, romanized: Šarrugi; died c. 2279 BC), also known as Sargon the Great, was the first ruler of the Akkadian Empire, known for his conquests of the Sumerian city-states in the 24th to 23rd centuries BC. He is sometimes identified as the first person in recorded history to rule over an empire.
He was the founder of the "Sargonic" or "Old Akkadian" dynasty, which ruled for about a century after his death until the Gutian conquest of Sumer.
The Sumerian King List makes him the cup-bearer to King Ur-Zababa of Kish before becoming king himself.
His empire, which he ruled from his archaeologically as-yet-unidentified capital, Akkad, is thought to have included most of Mesopotamia and parts of the Levant, Hurrian and Elamite territory.
Sargon appears as a legendary figure in Neo-Assyrian literature of the 8th to 7th centuries BC. Tablets with fragments of a Sargon Birth Legend were found in the Library of Ashurbanipal.
Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.