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Sargon of Akkad, also known as Sargon the Great (Akkadian Šarru-kÄ«nu, meaning 'the true king' or 'the legitimate king'), was a Semitic Akkadian emperor famous for his conquest of the Sumerian city-states in the 23rd and 22nd centuries BC.<br/><br/> The founder of the Dynasty of Akkad, Sargon reigned in the last quarter of the third millennium BCE. He became a prominent member of the royal court of Kish, killing the king and usurping his throne before embarking on the quest to conquer Mesopotamia. He was originally referred to as Sargon I until records concerning an Assyrian king also named Sargon (now usually referred to as Sargon I) were unearthed.<br/><br/> Sargon's vast empire is thought to have included large parts of Mesopotamia, and included parts of modern-day Iran, Asia Minor and Syria. He ruled from a new, but as yet archaeologically unidentified capital, Akkad (Agade), which the Sumerian king list claims he built (or possibly renovated). He is sometimes regarded as the first person in recorded history to create a multiethnic, centrally ruled empire. His dynasty controlled Mesopotamia for around a century and a half.
Khafajah was occupied during the Early Dynastic Period, through the Sargonid Period, then came under the control of Eshnunna after the fall of the Ur III Empire. Later, after Eshnunna was captured by Babylon, a fort was built at the site by Samsu-iluna of the First Babylonian Dynasty and named Dur-Samsuiluna.<br/><br/> The history of Khafajah is known in somewhat more detail for a period of several decades as a result of the discovery of 112 tablets in a temple of the god Sin. The tablets constitute part of an official archive and include mostly loan and legal documents.
Cuneiform script is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Emerging in Sumer around the 30th century BC, with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium (the Uruk IV period), cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs. In the three millennia the script spanned, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract as the number of characters in use also grew gradually smaller, from about 1,000 unique characters in the Early Bronze Age to about 400 unique characters in Late Bronze Age (Hittite cuneiform).<br/><br/> The original Sumerian script was adapted for the writing of the Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Luwian, Hattic, Hurrian, and Urartian languages, and it inspired the Ugaritic and Old Persian alphabets. Cuneiform writing was gradually replaced by the Phoenician alphabet during the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and by the 2nd century AD, the script had become extinct.<br/><br/> Cuneiform documents were written on clay tablets, by means of a blunt reed for a stylus. The impressions left by the stylus were wedge shaped, thus giving rise to the name cuneiform ('wedge shaped', from the Latin cuneus, meaning 'wedge').
Akkadian is an extinct Semitic language (part of the greater Afroasiatic language family) that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated language isolate. The name of the language is derived from the city of Akkad, a major centre of Mesopotamian civilization.
Sargon of Akkad, also known as Sargon the Great (Akkadian Šarru-kÄ«nu, meaning 'the true king' or 'the legitimate king'), was a Semitic Akkadian emperor famous for his conquest of the Sumerian city-states in the 23rd and 22nd centuries BC.<br/><br/> The founder of the Dynasty of Akkad, Sargon reigned in the last quarter of the third millennium BCE. He became a prominent member of the royal court of Kish, killing the king and usurping his throne before embarking on the quest to conquer Mesopotamia. He was originally referred to as Sargon I until records concerning an Assyrian king also named Sargon (now usually referred to as Sargon I) were unearthed.<br/><br/> Sargon's vast empire is thought to have included large parts of Mesopotamia, and included parts of modern-day Iran, Asia Minor and Syria. He ruled from a new, but as yet archaeologically unidentified capital, Akkad (Agade), which the Sumerian king list claims he built (or possibly renovated). He is sometimes regarded as the first person in recorded history to create a multiethnic, centrally ruled empire. His dynasty controlled Mesopotamia for around a century and a half.
Sargon of Akkad, also known as Sargon the Great (Akkadian Šarru-kÄ«nu, meaning 'the true king' or 'the legitimate king'), was a Semitic Akkadian emperor famous for his conquest of the Sumerian city-states in the 23rd and 22nd centuries BC.<br/><br/> The founder of the Dynasty of Akkad, Sargon reigned in the last quarter of the third millennium BCE. He became a prominent member of the royal court of Kish, killing the king and usurping his throne before embarking on the quest to conquer Mesopotamia. He was originally referred to as Sargon I until records concerning an Assyrian king also named Sargon (now usually referred to as Sargon I) were unearthed.<br/><br/> Sargon's vast empire is thought to have included large parts of Mesopotamia, and included parts of modern-day Iran, Asia Minor and Syria. He ruled from a new, but as yet archaeologically unidentified capital, Akkad (Agade), which the Sumerian king list claims he built (or possibly renovated). He is sometimes regarded as the first person in recorded history to create a multiethnic, centrally ruled empire. His dynasty controlled Mesopotamia for around a century and a half.