Akkadian Empire

For about a hundred and eighty years, from 2334 to 2154 BCE on the count most historians use, one family of kings ruled Mesopotamia from a new city, Agade, also called Akkad. Sargon, a Semitic-speaking king from the north of the plain, took the Sumerian city-states, which had fought one another for centuries, and held them from that single capital. A later list of kings, the Sumerian King List, gives the house eleven kings and 181 years, and then says that Agade was defeated. The kings wrote in Akkadian, their own Semitic language, using the cuneiform signs the Sumerians had invented, and Akkadian became the language of government. The land of Akkad was the country where the Tigris and the Euphrates run closest, north of Sumer and past the line of modern Fallujah and Baghdad. The city of Agade itself has never been found.

The height of the empire was the reign of Naram-Sin, Sargon's grandson, put at about 2254 to 2218 BCE. His victory stele, a slab of pink limestone two metres high, now in the Louvre, shows him climbing a wooded mountain over the fallen Lullubi, a people of the Zagros hills. He is drawn far larger than his men, and he wears the horned crown that belonged to gods. A copper statue found at Bassetki carries the one inscription that says how he became a god: after he had saved his city in a time of trouble, the people of Agade asked the great gods, Enlil at Nippur and Sin at Ur among them, to make him the god of Agade, and a temple was built for him in the city. That trouble was a great revolt which nearly cost him the kingdom. The year of the revolt, and even the length of his reign, are argued. Sargon's daughter Enheduanna was high priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur. Hymns in her name are the earliest poems attached to a person we can name. Sumerologists disagree on whether she wrote them: the oldest copies are from centuries later.

Naram-Sin's son Shar-kali-sharri ruled for twenty-five years, about 2217 to 2193. A seal cut for his scribe still calls him the divine king of Akkad, but his own year-names do not. His successors were smaller men. The King List then asks, 'Who was king? Who was not king?' and gives four names, Irgigi, Nanum, Imi and Elulu, three years between them. Dudu and his son Shu-Durul held what was left until 2154, when the List says Agade was defeated and the kingship passed to Uruk. Gutians from the Zagros are the villains of a later poem, the Curse of Agade, which blames the fall on Naram-Sin's looting of Enlil's temple at Nippur and has the god send those mountain people down onto the plain. The poem is Old Babylonian literature, copied centuries after the city fell, not a report from the time. The King List itself puts a short dynasty at Uruk between Agade's defeat and the Gutian kings. The round date 2154 is a frame, not a day anyone recorded.

What the empire left was a pattern and a language. It was the first state in Mesopotamia to hold many cities, and peoples who were not its own, from one centre for generations, and later kings of Babylon and Assyria took it as the model of what a great reign looked like. Akkadian remained the written language of Babylonia and Assyria, and of letters between kings across the Near East, long after Agade was gone. Naram-Sin was the first Mesopotamian king to have the sign for a god written before his name. His stele stood at Sippar for a thousand years, until an Elamite king carried it to Susa as booty; that stone, not the bronze head of an Akkadian king found at Nineveh, is the picture of the empire. The head is on the entry for Sargon. The Curse said Agade would never be lived in again. No dig has yet produced the city.