Sargon, a ruler of ancient Mesopotamia (reigned 2334–2279 BC), was one of the world's first great empire founders, conquering all of southern Mesopotamia and parts of Syria, Anatolia, and western Iran. He founded the first Semitic dynasty in the region and is considered the founder of the Mesopotamian military tradition.
What is known about Sargon comes almost entirely from the legends and stories that have been circulating in the cuneiform history of Mesopotamia for 2,000 years, rather than from the documentary records of his lifetime. The reason for the lack of contemporary records is that the capital city he built, Akkad (Akha), was never discovered and excavated. It was destroyed at the end of the dynasty founded by Sargon and has never been inhabited again, at least not under the name of Akkadian.
According to a legend, Sargon was a self-reliant man from humble beginnings;A gardener found a baby floating in his basket on the river and raised him**. His father is unknown;His childhood name is also unknown;His mother is said to have been a priestess in a town in the middle of the Euphrates. Thus, he rose to prominence without the help of influential relatives and obtained the position of bartender as the ruler of the city of Kish in the northern part of the ancient kingdom of Sumer. The event that elevated him to supremacy was the defeat of Lukarzakis of Uruk, a central Sumerian city-state (the biblical version of Eliage, central Sumer). Lukarzakis had already unified the Sumerian city-states by defeating each city-state in turn, and claimed to rule not only the Sumerian city-states, but also the lands as far west as the Mediterranean. As a result, Sargon became king of all the city-states of southern Mesopotamia, and he was the first great ruler to speak a Semitic language (known as Akkadian) by birth, although some early kings with Semitic names are also recorded in the Sumerian list of kings. However, victory was ensured only after many battles, as each city-state wanted to restore its independence without yielding to a new overlord. However, information related to this period is still very limited, so information from this period is completely undocumented.
Due to Sargon's military prowess and organizational prowess, as well as the legacy of the Sumerian city-states he inherited through conquest and the ** of the early Sumerian city-states with other nations, commercial ties flourished, with links to the Indus Valley, the coast of Oman, the islands and coasts of the Persian Gulf, the lapis lazuli mines of Badakhshan Province, the cedars of Lebanon, the silver-rich Tours Mountains, Cappadocia, Crete, and even Greece.
Under Sargon's rule, Akkadian gradually adapted to the script previously used in Sumerian, and a new calligraphic spirit can be seen on the clay tablets of this dynasty, which are also clearly reflected in the cylinder seals of the same period, which show beautiful and elaborate mythological and festive scenes of life. Even if this new artistic sensibility is not necessarily directly attributable to Sargon's personal influence, it shows that military and economic values were not the only values that mattered in his new capital.
Sargon attributed his success to the protection of the goddess Ishta, and the city of Akkadian was founded in her honor. Sargon became the first great empire founder. The two later Assyrian kings were named after him. Although Lukar Zaggis's brief account indicates that expansion beyond the Sumerian homeland had begun, later Mesopotamians saw Sargon as the founder of a military tradition that ran through their national history.