Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Sargon of Akkad
Summary
Sargon of Akkad (ˈsɑrgɒn; Šarrugi), also known as Sargon the Great, was the first ruler of the Akkadian Empire, known for his conquests of the Sumerian city-states in the 24th to 23rd centuries BC. He is sometimes identified as the first person in recorded history to rule over an empire.
He was the founder of the "Sargonic" or "Old Akkadian" dynasty, which he ruled for about a century after his death until the Gutian conquest of Sumer.
The Sumerian king list makes him the cup-bearer to king Ur-Zababa of Kish.
His empire is thought to have included most of Mesopotamia, parts of the Levant, besides incursions into Hurrian and Elamite territory, ruling from his (archaeologically as yet unidentified) capital, Akkad.
Sargon appears as a legendary figure in Neo-Assyrian literature of the 8th to 7th centuries BC.
Tablets with fragments of a Sargon Birth Legend were found in the Library of Ashurbanipal.
The Akkadian name is normalized as either Šarru-ukīn or Šarru-kēn. The name's cuneiform spelling is variously LUGAL-ú-kin,
šar-ru-gen6, šar-ru-ki-in, šar-ru-um-ki-in.
In Old Babylonian tablets relating the legends of Sargon, his name is transcribed as (Šar-ru-um-ki-in).
In Late Assyrian references, the name is mostly spelled as LUGAL-GI.NA or LUGAL-GIN, i.e. identical to the name of the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II.
The spelling Sargon is derived from the single mention of the name (in reference to Sargon II) in the Hebrew Bible, as סַרְגוֹן, in Isaiah 20:1.
The first element in the name is šarru, the Akkadian (East Semitic) for "king" (c.f. Hebrew śar שַׂר). The second element is derived from the verb kīnum "to confirm, establish" (related to Hebrew kūn כּוּן).
A possible interpretation of the reading Šarru-ukīn is "the king has established (stability)" or "he [the god] has established the king". Such a name would however be unusual; other names in -ukīn always include both a subject and an object, as in Šamaš-šuma-ukīn "Shamash has established an heir".
There is some debate over whether the name was an adopted regnal name or a birth name.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.