Akkadian Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  Naram-Sin, king of Agade, declared himself a living god while still breathing, the first ruler in Sumerian culture to claim that for himself. His grandfather Sargon had been the son of a gardener, or so the Sumerian King List records. Between those two men stretches the Akkadian Empire, a kingdom established around 2334 BCE that historians sometimes call the first empire in world history. It rose from the city of Akkad, a capital that has never been found on the ground. Centered near where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet, in modern-day Iraq, it pulled the Semitic Akkadian speakers and the Sumerians under one rule. How does a state govern from a capital we cannot locate? Why would a king carve curses against anyone who dared erase his name? And what does a four thousand year old drought have to do with the fall of a god-king? The answers live in clay, in stone, and in a long shadow that later Mesopotamians could never stop retelling.

• 2. A Capital That Vanished

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  Akkad has not yet been identified on the ground, a fact that shapes everything historians can know about its empire. The capital is grouped with the lost seats of the later Mitanni and the Sealand, all of them unlocated despite much speculation. The name Akkad is itself of non-Akkadian origin, and at least one text predates the reign of Sargon, hints that the city may have been occupied in pre-Sargonic times. Without the capital, the work of archaeology shifts to the provincial cities where the empire installed regional governors. Adab is one, where Naram-Sin established direct imperial control after the city joined what later sources called the great revolt. After destroying the city of Mari, the Akkadians rebuilt it as an administrative center under an imperial governor. The city of Nuzi was founded by the Akkadians, and economic and administrative texts were recovered there, alongside finds at Marad, Nippur, Tutub, and Ebla. At Tell Brak, excavation suggests the Akkadians rebuilt a city, called Brak or Nagar, as an administrative center, complete with a temple, offices, a courtyard, and large ovens. Even dating the period is hard, because Early Dynastic features and Akkadian ones do not always separate cleanly. The standard range is 2334 to 2154 BC under the middle chronology, with the rise of Sargon likely overlapping the late Early Dynastic Period.

• 3. The Gardener Who Took A Throne

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  Sargon began, by his own legend, as a baby set in a basket of rushes and sealed with bitumen, cast into a river that did not rise over him. In a Neo-Assyrian text he says his changeling mother bore him in secret, and that Akki, the drawer of water, found him and raised him as a gardener. The Sumerian King List names him the son of a gardener. Later legends gave his father the name La'ibum or Itti-Bel, and made his mother a priestess of Ishtar. Originally a cupbearer to Ur-Zababa, a king of Kish, Sargon held a position far more powerful than the title suggests, close to the king and tied to organizing canal labor. That access to a disciplined corps of workers may have given him his first soldiers. Displacing Ur-Zababa, he was crowned king. He then defeated the Sumerian king Lugal-zage-si at the Battle of Uruk and took his territory. Four times he invaded Syria and Canaan, spending three years subduing the lands of the west to bind them with Mesopotamia into a single empire. His reach is said to have run to the Mediterranean Sea and perhaps Cyprus, eastward over Elam, and as far south as Magan. He claimed kingship for fifty-six years, though only four of his year-names survive. To hold his conquests, he replaced the rulers he beat with noble citizens of his own city, where loyalty was assured. In his old age, a later Babylonian text records, all the lands revolted and besieged him in Akkad, yet he went forth and destroyed their vast army.

• 4. Sons Who Died By The Sword

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  Rimush, who reigned roughly 2278 to 2270 BC, kept meticulous records of his own destruction. Facing widespread revolts, he reconquered Ur, Umma, Adab, Lagash, Der, and Kazallu from rebellious ensis, and turned to mass slaughter of the Sumerian city-states. His own inscriptions tally the dead and the enslaved across cities like Adab, Zabala, Umma, Ur, Lagash, and Kazallu, with totals running into the tens of thousands killed and tens of thousands more captured and enslaved. After all that, he was assassinated by some of his own courtiers. His elder brother Manishtushu, who ruled about 2269 to 2255 BC, fought a sea battle against thirty-two kings who had gathered against him, seizing their country in what is now the United Arab Emirates and Oman. His standard inscription tells how he had ships cross the Lower Sea, struck down the rulers of the cities across the water, and quarried black stone from the mountains, mooring the loaded ships at the quay of Agade. Despite this, he too seems to have died in a palace conspiracy. The Ur III version of the Sumerian King List even inverts the order of these two brothers, a sign of how slippery the record becomes when the inscriptions run thin.

• 5. King Of The Four Quarters

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  Naram-Sin, who ruled about 2254 to 2218 BC, was addressed as the god of Agade, set above the older belief that kings were only the people's representatives before the gods. His portraits showed him larger than mortals and set apart from his retainers, and from him onward the Akkadian kings were considered gods on earth while they lived. He took the title King of the Four Quarters, the four quarters standing for the entire world. The Bassetki Statue, the copper base of one of his statues, records how the four quarters revolted against him together, and how he was victorious in nine battles in a single year, capturing the rival kings the rebels had raised. That same inscription tells how the citizens of his city asked eight chief deities, including Astar in Eanna and Enlil in Nippur, that Naram-Sin be made the god of their city, and how they built a temple to him within Agade. It ends with a curse: that anyone who removes the inscription have his foundations torn out and his progeny destroyed. To police Syria, Naram-Sin built a royal residence at Tell Brak, at the heart of the Khabur River basin. He recorded the conquest of Ebla, of Armanum and its king, and marched against Magan, where he personally caught its king Mandannu. A campaign against the Lullubi produced the Victory Stele now held in the Louvre. He also married his daughter Tar'am-Agade to a ruler at Urkesh, a marriage confirmed by a clay sealing found at Tell Mozan.

• 6. Reading An Empire In Clay

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  The Me-sag Archive, whose publication began in 1958, is one of the most significant collections from the Sargonic period. It holds about 500 tablets, roughly half of them published, kept mainly at the Babylonian Collection of Yale University and the Baghdad Museum. They date from late in the reign of Naram-Sin to early in the reign of Shar-kali-sharri, and are thought to come from a town between Umma and Lagash, with Me-sag as the governor of Umma. A separate archive of 47 tablets turned up at Tell Suleimah in the Hamrin Basin. Before the empire, years were marked by Regnal Numbers, but the Sargonic period used a system of year-names, like the one naming the year Shar-kali-sharri laid the foundations of temples to Annunitum and Aba in Babylon and defeated Sharlak, king of Gutium. Only three of Sargon's presumed forty year-names are known, against twenty of Naram-Sin's presumed fifty-six. These names are vital, since one of them tells us the empire fought the Gutians long before its end. Seals matter too. Two seals and a sealing from the Royal Cemetery at Ur carried the name of Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon, confirming that she existed. One names her hairdresser, Ilum-palil, and another names Adda, the supervisor of her estate.

• 7. The First Named Author

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  Enheduanna, who lived around 2285 to 2250 BC, is the first poet in history whose name is known. Daughter of Sargon and high priestess of the moon god Nanna at the temple of Sin in Ur, she wrote hymns to the goddess Inanna, including the Exaltation of Inanna and In-nin sa-gur-ra, along with a collection called the Temple Hymns. Her works begin in the third person and then shift to the first-person voice of the poet herself, a turn that marks a real development in the use of cuneiform. In the Exaltation of Inanna she casts the goddess as a force of battle, joining the warlike qualities of the Akkadian Ishtar to the gentler Sumerian goddess of love. She likens Inanna to a great storm bird swooping down on the lesser gods, sending them fluttering off like surprised bats. Then she steps forward herself, reciting her past glories and her present plight. She has been banished from the temple at Ur and from Uruk and exiled to the steppe, because Uruk under the ruler Lugalanne has rebelled against Sargon. The rebel destroyed the temple Eanna, one of the greatest temples in the ancient world, and made advances on his sister-in-law. Installing daughters as high priestesses was a deliberate strategy of rule, used by Sargon with Enheduanna and by Naram-Sin with Emmenanna.

• 8. Drought, Gutians, And A Dark Age

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  Water levels in the Tigris and Euphrates fell a meter and a half below the level of 2600 BC, a drop tied to the empire's undoing. Around 2200 BC a marked increase in aridity and wind, following a volcanic eruption, degraded the rain-fed farmland of the Upper Country that had kept the empire solvent. At Tell Leilan, soil samples show fine wind-blown sand, no earthworm activity, and skeleton-thin sheep and cattle that died of drought, with up to 28,000 people abandoning the site. Tell Brak shrank by 75 percent, and trade collapsed. This climate event, sometimes called the 4.2 kiloyear event, seems to have struck the whole Middle East and coincided with the collapse of the Egyptian Old Kingdom. The empire likely fell in the 22nd century BC, within 180 years of its founding. The literary Cursing of Agade, composed in the Ur III period, blamed everything on Naram-Sin for leveling the Ekur temple of Enlil, which made the eight chief deities withdraw their protection. That same composition describes the Gutians as an unbridled people with human intelligence but canine instincts, swooping on the ground in great flocks. Cuneiform sources say the Gutian administration cared little for agriculture or public safety, releasing farm animals to roam and bringing famine and soaring grain prices. The Sumerian King List asks, who was king, who was not king, listing four men who reigned only three years before Agade was defeated and its kingship carried off to Uruk. Not every scholar accepts the drought theory. Richard Zettler argues the chronology is too uncertain and warns against reading Akkadian writings too literally. The Sumerian king Ur-Nammu, who ruled about 2112 to 2095 BC, finally cleared the Gutians from Mesopotamia, opening the Ur III period in which documents were once again written in Sumerian.