The most aggressive king in Iraq, Lugalzaggesi of Umma, was marching on Kish: Ur-Zabada sent Sargon to negotiate with him. But his letter asked Lugalzaggesi to kill Sargon. Lugalzaggesi contemptuously revealed the request and unleashed Sargon, who seized Uruk. But then he routed Lugalzaggesi and around 2334 surges into history in his own inscriptions, taking the regnal name Rightful King – Sharrumkin.* He paraded the fallen Lugalzaggesi through the Temple of Enlil, where he smashed his skull with a mace.
Sargon galloped south ‘to wash his weapons in the sea’ – the Persian Gulf – then eastwards. ‘Sargon King of Kish,’ reads the inscription on his tablets, ‘triumphed in thirty-four battles,’ invading the kingdom of Elam in Iran and, after advancing northwards, defeating the nomadic Amorites and taking the cities of Ashur and Nineveh, before turning west into Syria and Türkiye. He was now calling himself King of the Four Quarters of the World, and a later legend praises his fighting prowess in an unforgettable metaphor:
The writhing ranks will writhe back and forth,
Two women in labour, bathed in their own blood!
Sargon created the first power family which we can know personally: it was his daughter Enheduanna, who was the first poetess. But naturally she was also a connoisseur of paternal power: ‘My King, something’s been created here that no one’s created before.’ She meant empire.
ENHEDUANNA’S REVENGE
It was no coincidence that Sargon appointed his daughter Enheduanna as high priestess of the moon god of Uruk. Temples were rich complexes at the centre of Akkadian cities. Sargon himself may have been the first ruler to maintain a standing army – 5,400 men ate daily at his table in Akkad. He enforced law that was a mixture of reason and magic: water ordeals decided difficult cases. At her temple, Enheduanna presided over thousands of employees and estates. The relationship between the temples and the royal family was close: Sargon believed that Inanna (Ishtar) and her divine husband Dagan were his special protectors.
When Sargon died he left Enheduanna in charge of her temple, but the new king, her brother Rimush, immediately faced rebellions and invasions. These he defeated, killing 23,000 people, torturing, enslaving and deporting others, then he invaded Elam (Iran), and returned with gold, copper and more slaves. Rimush died in a special way, assassinated by killer scribes, stabbed either with the reeds used for writing or the copper pins used to attach the cylinder seals – the first death by bureaucracy! The Sargons lived by conquest: it was Sargon’s grandson, Enheduanna’s nephew Naram-Sin, who probably faced the revolt of Lugal – and the capture and rape of his aunt. Naram-Sin smashed the usurper and restored the high priestess to her temple. We do not know when she died, but Naram-Sin ruled for thirty-seven years, carrying out sorties into Iran to smash the Lullubi raiders, boasting of killing 90,000 and claiming that he ruled lands as far away as Lebanon. On his Victory Stele, Naram-Sin is a muscular, bare-chested warrior wearing a divine horned helmet and tight kilt, holding a spear and bow and crushing his enemies in Iran, with nothing between him, the Mighty, and the sun and stars: the first mortal to be depicted as equal to a goddess.
The capital Akkad flourished under House Sargon. Its location is unknown, but standing somewhere on the Tigris it became a new sort of city. ‘Its population dine on the best of food, draw the best of drinks, make merry in the courtyard and throng the festival grounds,’ recounts The Epic of Gilgamesh, probably referring to Akkad.* ‘Acquaintances dine together. Monkeys, mighty elephants … dogs, lions, ibexes and sheep jostle each other in public places …’, while its stores were packed with ‘gold and silver, copper, tin and blocks of lapis’. Grandees dressed richly, both men and women wearing cosmetics and taking trouble with their hair. Fashions changed as quickly as they do today – Sargon had worn a shaggy coat; the Naram-Sin elite preferred a robe tied with a pin at the shoulder. Akkadians consulted diviners – using extispicy, the reading of animal entrails – to advise on their decisions. There was a culinary cult: tablets record the variety of food eaten, from sheep and pigs to deer, rabbits, fieldmice, jerboas and hedgehogs. Beer was the favourite drink, enjoyed by men and women, made from fermented barley, drunk through a straw, at taverns run by independent women. Elite girls attended school and could write both Sumerian and Akkadian. In glimpses of family life, women gave birth in a seated position; children are shown playing with rattles, wheeled sheep and mini-wagons. Love spells were common: girls wore love charms around their thighs.
Foreigners wandered its streets, admiring its wonders. ‘Tigi drums, flutes and zamzam instruments resounded,’ says The Epic: ‘its harbours where ships moored were full of joy,’ trading with the entire Indian Ocean: ‘at the wharf … ships moor from Meluhha [India/Pakistan], Magan [Yemen/Oman] and Dilmun [Bahrain]’. Amorites, Meluhhans, Elamites bore goods there ‘like laden donkeys’, traders paying for their goods in barley or silver: there were so many Meluhhans that they lived together in their own village.
Meluhha – land of ivory – was centred around two cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, on the Indus (Pakistan but extending into India and Afghanistan), so well planned that they were built in grids with standardized bricks and even boasted public rubbish bins, and public lavatories and sewers that London would not possess until the nineteenth century and that are not universal in south Asia today. Using their own (still undeciphered) script, their workshops made jewellery in ivory, gold, carnelian, as well as textiles and ceramics. Mohenjo-daro may have housed as many as 85,000 people, the biggest city in the world, but its largest building was a public bath – no palaces, no ziggurats.
These Indian cities were not ruled by single kings; more likely they were governed by councils – perhaps Pakistan/India invented democracy – but the bathhouse stood in a sequestered citadel which might suggest it was the precinct of a priestly elite. Versions of urban life were being sampled simultaneously on several continents. In China, there were towns on the Yellow River and in the north, at Shimao (Shaanxi). In Ukraine, Taljanky, containing 10,000 people, was larger and maybe even earlier than the first city at Uruk. In America, long since separated from Asia, people in Mexico and Guatemala were building towns with as many as 10,000 inhabitants and pyramidal mounds that reflected their sacred calendar, using a form of writing, storing surplus maize in storehouses, and sculpting giant heads, probably of their rulers, who seem to be sporting helmets worn for their ballgames.* On the Mississippi, people were raising monumental earthworks that somehow linked stars and calendar: the inhabitants of the largest of these – now called Poverty Point – were not farmers but nomadic hunters who somehow came together to build massive structures.
In west Asia, the Sargon family illustrated a paradox of empire. The bigger it grew, the more borders had to be defended; the richer it was, the more tempting a target it became for less settled neighbours – and the greater was the incentive for destructive family feuds. Drought brought hunger; nomads swooped on the cities. In 2193 BC, the Sargons lost controclass="underline" ‘Who was king?’ asks the Sumerian king list. ‘Who was not king?’ By 1800, west Asia was in turmoil – even Egypt ceased to be a player in the most humiliating and gruesome way. It started with a row about hippopotami.