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A reed-basket baby became emperor
The Gardener's Foundling
A gardener who worked at the palace in Kish found the infant and raised him as his son. The boy, Sargon, was born sometime in the middle of the 24th century BC. His charm won him a post as cupbearer, bringing wine to lords and kings, a job that gave a young man influence in the palace.
Striking Uruk
Kish then belonged to the Sumerian empire of King Lugalzagesi, who was away on a distant campaign with much of his army. Sargon was handed a small band of fighters and a confidential mission: strike Uruk, Lugalzagesi's royal seat, by surprise and free Kish from imperial control. Few defenders were left behind Uruk's famous walls. Sargon's men overran them, the defenders fled, and before reinforcements arrived he demolished several sections of the wall.
Beating Lugalzagesi
Lugalzagesi came home furious and gathered the kings under him along the way, and his inscriptions mention up to 50 who marched under his banner. Sargon's army still won. He led Lugalzagesi through the gates of Nippur wearing a neck lock, a heavy piece of wood fitted around the neck and shoulders. Then he spared him. Lugalzagesi kept ruling Uruk as long as he swore an oath to Sargon.
Sargon founded a new capital called Akkad and tore down the walls of every city he took, so none could rebel from behind them. He ruled for 55 years.
Where else does the reed-basket baby appear?
A Neo-Assyrian text known as the Sargon Legend tells the basket story in Sargon's own voice. It says his mother set him in a basket of reeds sealed with bitumen and let the river carry him off. The surviving copies were written more than a thousand years after his reign. The Hebrew Bible tells a similar story of the infant Moses in a basket among the reeds of the Nile, and scholars have compared the two accounts since the 19th century.
How did Akkadian become an imperial language?
Akkadian is a Semitic language unrelated to Sumerian, and Sargon's dynasty adapted cuneiform signs from Sumerian to write it. Royal inscriptions in Akkadian spread across the lands the dynasty ruled. Over the following centuries it became the language of diplomacy, and in the 14th century BC the kings of Egypt and the Near East still wrote to one another in it on clay tablets. The best-known collection of those letters was found at Amarna in Egypt.
How far did Sargon's empire reach?
Later Mesopotamian tradition credits Sargon with conquests from the lower sea, the Persian Gulf, to the upper sea, usually read as the Mediterranean. His grandson Naram-Sin pushed the empire further and took the title King of the Four Quarters. Archaeologists have found Akkadian-era administration at Tell Brak in northern Syria, where Naram-Sin built a large fortified building.
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