Akkadian Empire
▶ Explore on the mapThe Akkadian Empire is usually treated as the first state to unite most of Mesopotamia under one ruler. It grew up around the city of Akkad, whose site has never been found, when Sargon, formerly a cupbearer of the king of Kish, overthrew the Sumerian hegemony and went on to take Ur, Uruk and Lagash. Later royal inscriptions credit him with campaigns from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, though historians argue over how much is propaganda. His grandson Naram-Sin took the title king of the four quarters and had himself portrayed wearing the horned crown of divinity, a break with earlier Sumerian practice. The empire ran through appointed governors and a standing army, and it standardised weights, measures and scribal practice across its territory. Contacts stretched from Dilmun in the Gulf to the silver mines of Anatolia and the cedar forests of Lebanon. Wealth rested on irrigated farming and trade, and a severe drought around 2200 BCE, visible in the neglected canals at Girsu, coincided with the loss of central authority. Raids from the Zagros by the Gutians completed the collapse, and local dynasties such as the Third Dynasty of Ur took back control within a century. Akkadian, a Semitic language, nevertheless remained the diplomacy of the Near East for a thousand years, and Sargon served as a model for later kings.