The Age of Agade

Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia

Benjamin R. Foster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138909755
• eBook ISBN: 9781317415510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The Age of Agade is the first book-length study of the Akkadian period of Mesopotamian history, which saw the rise and fall of the world's first empire during more than a century of extraordinary political, social, and cultural innovation. It draws together more than 40 years of research by one of the world's leading experts in Assyriology to offer an exhaustive survey of the Akkadian empire.

Addressing all aspects of the empire, including its statecraft and military, territory and cities, arts, religion, economy, and production, The Age of Agade considers what can be said of Akkadian political and social history, material culture, and daily life. A final chapter also explores how the empire has been presented in modern historiography, from the decipherment of cuneiform to the present, including the extensive research of Soviet historians, summarized here in English for the first time. Drawing on contemporaneous written and artifactual sources, as well as relevant materials from succeeding generations, Foster introduces the reader to the wealth of evidence available. Accessibly written by a specialist in the field, this book is an engaging examination of a critical era in the history of early Mesopotamia.

1
The rise and fall of the Akkadian Empire

1. The king’s feast

About 2260 BCE, 964 men in the land of Akkad sat down to a royal feast, but they had little to celebrate. True, some had been given new clothes and jewelry. Some boasted new teams of mules and a wagon to go with them, as well as implements and other gifts. A few had sufficient cash to buy and furnish good-sized houses. The food, no doubt, was excellent, probably pork roasted over an open fire and assorted delicacies more typical of the royal table than of private life. Yet these men had just sold their ancestral lands to the king, Manishtusu, son of Sargon. Since portions of these lands bordered on royal domains, their owners could scarcely have refused the king’s offer. Using a productivity ratio from irrigated lands farther south, we find that the price paid in grain was only two years’ estimated harvest. What farmer would willingly sell his land for that amount?¹

Forty-nine men, called “Akkadians” in the sale document, were witnesses to the sale. They included scribes, administrators, military officers, governors, and temple staff, all dependent upon the king’s patronage. There can be little doubt that the purchase was to provide them with productive land in return for their service to the crown. The beneficiaries of such largesse were, like Manishtusu himself, only the second generation of a new elite, some of them the sons of governors and senior administrators from important cities, who had now assumed a new, Akkadian, identity. They had forsaken their own communities to serve the king, awaiting his command and assignment anywhere in the realm, “from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea.”²

The years of recent memory had been eventful ones, filled with repression and bloodshed. Manishtusu’s younger brother, Rimush, who had succeeded to their father Sargon’s throne ahead of his sibling, had been assassinated in a court conspiracy.³ The new king needed loyal followers, men he could rely on, in the military and in his administration. This purchase of 3430 hectares of arable land, if evenly divided among the forty-nine Akkadian witnesses, would yield individual parcels of seventy hectares, more than ten times larger than the six-hectare lots typically given to administrators barely a day’s journey south, but comparable to the average parcel of sixty-two hectares given to privileged administrators at Girsu, the Akkadian provincial capital of Sumer.⁴ So important was this transaction to the king that he had it carved in hard, black diorite, a stone brought by boat from the land of Magan in the Gulf and hauled upstream, along with ship-loads of other exotic goods now pouring into the capital city, Agade. The resulting monument, an impressive obelisk (Figure 1.1), a shape previously unknown in Mesopotamia, was set up in a temple, perhaps at Agade itself or at nearby Marad, where Manishtusu’s grandson, Lipit-ili, would one day rebuild the temple of the local god. On it are recorded the prices paid, the gifts the king bestowed, the parcels sold and their locations, the names of the sellers, and the names of the forty-nine Akkadian witnesses and beneficiaries. By this major outlay, Sargon’s elder son sought to enlarge his royal domains, to reward his followers, and to “make firm the foundations” of his kingdom, as the Akkadians expressed it.⁵

Figure 1.1 Diorite monument of Manishtusu, recording the king’s purchase of lands in Akkad.

2. Sargon the victorious

In his commemorative inscriptions, Sargon proclaims that he was victorious in thirty-four military campaigns. Whatever the reverses of his early career may have been, his triumphs began in Sumer, where he defeated and captured Lugalzagesi, king of Uruk, who had extended his hegemony over many of the Sumerian city-states and marched as far as the Mediterranean seacoast and the “Cedar Forest” of Lebanon. Besides Uruk, Sargon defeated Umma, Lagash, and Ur, and Uruk, enabling him to rule all of Sumer to the headwaters of the Gulf.⁶ Sargon also invaded Elam and Susa. Few future Mesopotamian dynasties would rule in this region, protected as it was by the desert, which wore down even the most formidable fighting forces. Sargon’s Elamite campaign may be commemorated in a massive diorite victory stele found there, showing Sargon himself and his retinue (Figure 1.2; compare Figure 9.5). At a later date, someone made a determined effort to destroy the stele, battering it with hammers and attempting to break or saw it into smaller pieces (Chapter 9 part 2; Chapter 11 part 2). Sargon’s conquests reached to the neighboring territories of Sabum and Awan. He even routed forces from Marhashi, perhaps the region around Kerman, known in Mesopotamia as a source of precious stones, alabaster vessels, and other luxury goods.⁷

Figure 1.2 Detail of a victory stele of Sargon, showing the king holding a battle net, a gash from later vandalism, a label reading “King Sargon,” and an attendant carrying a sunshade.

To the north and west, Sargon enjoyed the submission of Mari, which controlled the mid-Euphrates, and Ebla, south of Aleppo, one of Mari’s major rivals. By Sargon’s own account, Dagan, the god of clouds, bestowed upon him the “Upper Lands,” the territories and cities of the Upper Euphrates region and beyond.⁸ His armies may have pushed into central Anatolia as well, known to the Akkadians as a land of cedar trees and “silver” or snow-covered mountains.⁹ All this we read in his own records of his achievements.

In addition, Sargon wished to be remembered for three other accomplishments: placing Akkadians in governorships in the conquered lands; bringing international trade to his capital city, Agade; and having sufficient resources at his disposal to feed daily 5400 able-bodied men in his service.¹⁰

No previous ruler had ever made such claims of conquest and kingship. For ambitious conquerors of the future, Sargon posed a challenge to emulate, having changed forever the concept of what one warrior-king could achieve. The name and memory of Sargon remained in Mesopotamian consciousness, just as Alexander’s lived on in the Mediterranean; his story was told in new ways to meet the expectations of different generations. Indeed, for a Mesopotamian historian of Alexander’s own time, Sargon stood at the beginning of empirical human history, whereas the kings who lived before him were mythological figures whose exploits were performed in a world in which gods and human beings were characters in the same narratives. Sargon, though favored by the goddess Inanna/Ishtar, lived very much in the real world.¹¹

Generations of Mesopotamian historians in times to come would wish that they knew more about him. His parentage is obscure, for Sargon’s inscriptions, like those of his successors, do not name the father of the ruling king, as was customary in later periods.¹² A list of Mesopotamian kings, compiled a half-century or more after Sargon’s death, included him among eight remarkable past rulers who were not of royal birth, but this may not be based on fact.¹³ Imagination sought to fill in early incidents of his life.

According to one Sumerian tale, Sargon, charmed at birth, was cupbearer to Ur-Zababa, king of Kish. The cupbearer was a high official responsible for procuring and serving food and drink to the king and his court. As the young Sargon carries out his duties, he becomes aware that the goddess Inanna herself is close at hand, but he keeps his counsel. Inanna then forces the issue, appearing to Sargon in a terrifying dream, in which she covers him with blood. When he tells the king his dream, the king interprets the blood to be his own, so understands that his cupbearer will murder him. He sends a message to his chief smith, ordering him to kill Sargon when he arrives at a temple workshop with certain bronze drinking vessels the king will entrust to him, apparently for melting down. The plan seems to be to throw Sargon into the mold or crucible with the vessels. But Inanna stops Sargon just before he enters the building where the smith waits in ambush:

• Holy Inanna confronted him, she blocked his path.
• “Is the pure house not a holy temple? No man with blood on him may go therein!”
• He met the king’s master smith outside the door of the house where his doom had been decided,
• When he delivered the king’s drinking vessels to the master smith,
• Belish-tikal, the master smith, secured^? them from him, cast them in the mold.
• Sargon, after five days had passed, maybe ten,
• Came in before Ur-Zababa, his king,
• Came right in before him in his own palace, built solid as a mountain,
• King Ur-Zababa was afraid, shook with fear in his own dwelling.¹⁴

The true significance of the dream becomes apparent: Inanna had covered Sargon with blood to save him. The smith is awestruck by the goddess’s intervention, as is the king, when Sargon returns to the royal palace alive and well. Ur-Zababa realizes, as Sargon already knew, that his cupbearer has divine protection.

The theme that Sargon was charmed at birth and favored by the goddess Inanna was taken up more than a thousand years later, in an Akkadian composition that purports to be Sargon’s narrative of his own infancy. In it, we read that he was exposed as a newborn by his mother, a high priestess, making Sargon the first instance of the story, told also of Moses and Cyrus, of the foundling who later returns to claim his rightful inheritance. Sargon’s mother, as a high priestess, could have borne for the king an heir to the throne, but she might have given up the child to hide him from rival claimants, if his father had died.¹⁵

Although no literary works explicitly about Sargon or his exploits survive from the time of his dynasty (for the poetry by his daughter Enheduanna, whom he appointed high priestess at Ur, see Chapter 9 part 5 and Appendix II), heroic legends of his deeds were composed in Akkadian during the first half of the second millennium (Chapter 11 part 6).¹⁶ Some scholars consider these based on older epic poems, whereas others suggest that they were original compositions of their own time. In favor of the latter is their choice of setting, the north and west, that is, Assyria, north Syria, and the Anatolian plateau, rather than Sumer or Iran, the two areas stressed in authentic third-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations, citation conventions, and symbols
• Introduction
• 1 The rise and fall of the Akkadian Empire
• 2 The land and people of Akkad
• 3 Akkadian centers and settlements
• 4 Works and days
• 5 Industries and crafts
• 6 Religion
• 7 Statecraft and the military
• 8 Trade, business, and the economy
• 9 Arts, letters, and numeracy
• 10 Akkadian human values
• 11 The Akkadian period in retrospect
• 12 The Akkadian period in modern historiography
• Appendix I: Akkadian royal inscriptions
• Appendix II: Works attributed to Enheduanna
• Appendix III: Two Sumerian poems about the Akkadian period
• Sources for figures
• Bibliography
• Index