It would be remarkable if one man could intervene in the processes of history and effect such a degree of total change as now ensued throughout what once was called ‘the Fertile Crescent’; nonetheless, an official in the court of the King of Kish called Sharrukhin, and known more familiarly as Sargon, now emerged as a leader of exceptional authority and charisma. He swept to power over the fragmented and divided city states of Sumer which after more than a thousand years of brilliant flowering were now showing signs of exhaustion and incipient collapse.1
Sargon now established a glittering capital at Agade (whose whereabouts is still unknown) and a dynasty which endured for more than a hundred years — a creditable duration for any political construct in Sumer. He absorbed most of the culture of Sumer, only pausing to semiticize the names of the gods, and to adapt the Akkadian language to Sumerian cuneiform, to which in fact it was particularly ill-suited. He, or his grandson and most important successor Naram-Sin, is said to have fought a battle against and defeated a king called Manium. It was once believed, before the dating of the Akkadians was brought down to the period that it occupies today, that Manium was Menes, the mythical founder of the First Dynasty of Egypt; by accepted chronologies today this is impossible.
It is, however, possible that Sargon and his Egyptian contemporaries Wenis, Teti, and Pepi I may have known of each other’s existence. From the Fourth Dynasty Egypt traded with Ebla2 (Tell Mardikh), a great emporium in northern Syria, which also maintained relations with Dilmun in the Arabian Gulf.3 Doubtless too Sargon’s claim4 that his empire ran from the Lower Sea (the Arabian Gulf) to the Upper Sea (the Mediterranean) would have meant that the Levantine cities where his agents and armies were active would have made his name known to the Egyptians. Sargon’s empire even penetrated to the Holy Land of Dilmun in the Bitter Sea (another name for the Arabian Gulf), but whether the Egyptians either knew of this or cared if they did, is not known.
World History
