Around 2334 BCE, by the usual chronology, a man who took the name Sargon, meaning "the true king," seized power in the north of the southern plain. Later legends said he began as cupbearer to the king of Kish. Whatever his origins, he defeated Lugalzagesi of Umma, who had made himself master of Sumer, and went on to rule from the Gulf to northern Syria. Sargon's realm is often called the world's first empire: a state that ruled many different peoples and cities from one center. He built a new capital called Akkad, which has never been found.

Sargon and the Akkadian state

Sargon and his people spoke a Semitic language that we name after his capital. Sargon's empire used Akkadian, a Semitic language, alongside Sumerian in its records and inscriptions. Akkadian would remain the main written language of Mesopotamia for two thousand years, later splitting into Babylonian and Assyrian dialects. Sargon placed loyal governors over conquered cities and kept a standing force that he boasted ate daily before him.

Much of what people later believed about Sargon is legend. A famous text has his mother place him as a baby in a reed basket sealed with bitumen and set him on the river, where a gardener found and raised him. The story of Sargon in the reed basket comes from a legend written centuries after his death, probably in the first millennium BCE.

Enheduanna

Sargon placed his daughter in a powerful religious office. Enheduanna was Sargon's daughter and a high priestess of the moon god at Ur. Tradition credits her with hymns to temples across Sumer and with poems to the goddess Inanna, in which the speaker describes being driven from her temple and begs the goddess to restore her. Enheduanna is often remembered as the earliest author known by name, male or female. Some scholars caution that the texts survive only in copies made centuries later and may have been reshaped or even attributed to her afterward. Even so, the tradition shows that Mesopotamians themselves remembered a woman as a great poet.

A king who became a god

Sargon's grandson Naram-Sin, who ruled around 2254 to 2218 BCE, expanded the empire further and crushed a great revolt. Naram-Sin claimed to be a god while still alive, writing the sign for a deity before his own name, which no earlier Mesopotamian king had done. His victory stele, later carried off to Iran and now in the Louvre, shows him wearing the horned helmet of a god as he climbs a mountain over defeated enemies. A later poem called the Curse of Agade blamed the empire's fall on Naram-Sin's crimes against the god Enlil's temple at Nippur, a religious explanation written by people who knew how the story ended.

Collapse

The Akkadian empire broke apart around 2150 BCE. Cities revolted, and raiders from the Zagros mountains called the Gutians took control of parts of the land. Some scholars link Akkad's fall to a long drought around 2200 BCE, pointing to evidence from sediments and from the abandonment of northern sites such as Tell Leilan in Syria. Others doubt that climate alone explains it, since political strain and revolt were already visible.

The Third Dynasty of Ur

Around 2112 BCE Ur-Nammu, ruler of Ur, reunited the south and founded what historians call the Third Dynasty of Ur, or Ur III, which lasted until about 2004 BCE. He began the great ziggurat of Ur, a stepped temple tower whose lower stage still stands. He also issued a collection of laws. The laws of Ur-Nammu are the oldest law collection that survives, about three centuries older than Hammurabi's. The laws of Ur-Nammu often punished injuries with fines paid in silver: so many shekels for a broken bone or a cut-off nose, rather than a matching injury.

His son Shulgi ruled for about 48 years and built one of the most closely managed states of the ancient world. Shulgi standardized weights, measures and the calendar, set up road stations, reorganized the army and declared himself a god. Ur III officials left more than a hundred thousand tablets recording herds, harvests, workers' rations and deliveries. Around 2004 BCE the state collapsed under pressure from Amorite migrants and the armies of Elam, which captured Ur and led its last king away.

Worked example: A livestock depot

Near Nippur, Shulgi founded a center called Puzrish-Dagan, at the modern site of Drehem. Its surviving tablets record animals arriving and leaving day by day: sheep, goats and cattle sent as taxes from provinces, delivered to temples for offerings, to the palace for feasts or to officials as pay. One receipt might note a few dozen sheep with the date, the official responsible and his seal. Read together, thousands of such receipts let historians reconstruct the empire's tax system, its calendar of festivals and the movements of its officials. They also show the price of order: every herder and worker was counted, assigned and checked. Ur III gives us the first clear view of a bureaucratic state, one that could feed and protect many people but also treated them, on paper, as units of labor.