Sargon of Akkad and the World's First Empire

The event

According to his own later legend, Sargon was a foundling — a baby set adrift in a reed basket on the Euphrates River and rescued to serve in the royal court, before rising to found his own city, Akkad, and conquer an empire. Whatever the precise details, Sargon's rise from obscurity to supreme power around 2334 BC is one of history's genuine turning points: he defeated the Sumerian city-states one by one, including the powerful king Lugalzagesi of Uruk, and welded Sumer and Akkad into a single Akkadian Empire stretching from the Persian Gulf toward the Mediterranean coast.

Bible readers may notice an echo of Sargon's foundling legend centuries later in the account of baby Moses, hidden in a basket among the reeds of the Nile (Exodus 2:1-10) — worth noting honestly, though this Akkadian Sargon lived some sixteen centuries before the very different Sargon II of Assyria named in Isaiah 20:1, and the two should never be confused. The literary parallel actually cuts against skepticism rather than for it: royal-rescue legends were a known genre used to glorify a king's own destiny, while Moses' story is framed as the opposite — an ordinary, unglamorous rescue by his mother, sister, and an Egyptian princess, with all the glory directed toward God's providence rather than Moses' own greatness.

Sargon's Akkadian Empire mattered enormously for world history: it introduced the practice of ruling many different peoples and cities under one central king backed by a standing professional army, a model of empire that Assyria, Babylon, and Persia would all later imitate — the very empires that would eventually conquer, exile, and then permit the return of Israel and Judah. The pattern of empire itself, in other words, was already three-quarters of the way toward its biblical climax a full sixteen centuries before Nebuchadnezzar.

Dating

Sargon's regnal dates vary by several decades depending on which Mesopotamian chronology (long, middle, or short) a scholar follows; the dates given here follow the widely used 'middle chronology.'

Scripture references

• Exodus 2:1-10