History of the Ancient Near East · Part 4 · The first cities and kingdoms · B2
Sargon of Akkad: The First Empire
Part 4 of History of the Ancient Near East: around 2300 BCE, a man who called himself “the true king” conquered the cities of Sumer and ruled from the Gulf to the Mediterranean. His daughter was a high priestess and perhaps the first author we know by name. Seventeen centuries later, scribes told how he had been found as a baby in a basket on the river. Is said to have, may / might / must / can’t have, and according to legend, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, a king who was real, and a story about him that probably was not. Our job is to tell them apart.
Very. The legend is often more famous than the man.
And sometimes, I suspect, more useful to his friends.
Sargon (in Akkadian Sharru-kin, “the true king”) ruled for about fifty years, probably from around 2334 BCE, although dates this early differ by a century or more depending on the system scholars use. He came from the north of Sumer, spoke Akkadian, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Aramaic, and founded a new capital, Akkad. He defeated the Sumerian king of Uruk and claimed to rule “from the Lower Sea to the Upper Sea”: from the Persian Gulf to…
His own inscriptions survive mostly as later copies, made by scribes at Nippur a few centuries after his death. His daughter Enheduanna was high priestess of the moon god at Ur; a stone disk with her picture and name has been found there. Hymns to the goddess Inanna are said to have been written by her, which would make her the first author known by name, but some scholars think the hymns were later attributed to her.
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