History's first emperor ruled from a capital nobody has ever found
Sargon of Akkad is sometimes called the first person in recorded history to rule an empire, stretching across most of Mesopotamia and into the Levant. Yet his capital, Akkad, has never been located by archaeologists. Even the name we call him by comes from a single biblical verse about a different king.
According to the Sumerian King List, Sargon was a gardener's son who served as cup-bearer to Ur-Zababa, king of Kish, before seizing power himself. He took the kingship from Lugal-zage-si of Uruk and carried it to Akkad. Having subdued the city-states of Sumer during the 24th and 23rd centuries BC, he established a line of kings that endured roughly a century after his death, until the Gutians overran Sumer. In the middle chronology his reign runs from about 2334 to 2279 BC.
How long he ruled is disputed. Copies of the king list give anywhere from 34 to 56 years, and Benjamin Foster argued in 1982 that a figure of 55 was a corruption of an original 37. Only four year-names from his actual reign survive, recording campaigns against Elam, Mari, Simurrum and Uru'a. One of the key sources is an Old Babylonian copy of the inscriptions from a statue base Sargon set up in Enlil's temple at Nippur, found by a University of Pennsylvania expedition in the 1890s.
His Akkadian name, rendered Sharru-ukin or Sharru-ken, begins with sharru, meaning king, and continues with a root meaning to establish or legitimate, so it may translate as the king is legitimate. Scholars debate whether it was a birth name or one adopted on taking the throne. The English form Sargon derives from Isaiah 20:1, which actually refers to the later Assyrian king Sargon II.
Rediscovering him took decades of false starts. A mace-head bought by the British Museum in 1883 was attributed to Sargon, but in the 1910s scholars realised it belonged to his great-grandson Shar-kali-sharri. By the 8th to 7th centuries BC he had become a figure of legend, and fragments of a story about his birth turned up in the Library of Ashurbanipal.
Source: Sargon of Akkad
