The story begins with a hero, a young man of lowly birth. Although
depending on the version you hear he may be descended from kings and queens. In
another, he is the illegitimate son of a priestess, who not being able to keep
him, makes a basket out of reeds, seals it with tar, puts the newborn in and
places it in the river, where it is later found by a man who raises the child. I
know; eerily like the story in Willow, the Ron Howard-directed fantasy film
from 1988, right? It sounds like another story, but I can’t quite think of it.
Maybe something I heard in Sunday school?
Whichever version, most agree that the hero’s father, whether by blood or adoption, is a gardener in the palace of the King. The child, once grown to a young man, runs errands around the palace.
One night while the King is sleeping, he has a dream which troubles him, but he keeps it to himself. We never learn what the dream is about or how and why what follows next occurs, because the story was written on baked clay tablets, and as resilient as baked clay may be, broken shit does happen. But whatever the explanation, soon enough, the king promotes our hero to be his cup-bearer.
You may think that cup-bearer was a lowly servant job – the dude that fills your wine glass, but fancier – big deal! But you’d be very wrong. Cup-bearer was a very honored and high position. In the ancient – and not so ancient – world, assassination was a constant threat to monarchs and others in high positions. On the scale of ways to assassinate such people, poisoning is pretty high up there, so the person who was in charge of filling the King’s wine cup had to be someone he could trust with his very life. You can imagine the King’s dream might have been about being poisoned, and appointing this trusted young man to pour his wine gave him some relief. Or maybe the hero’s mere presence brought him some peace of mind. There go those weird memories of stories from Sunday school again.
But in time, whether the dream came back, or the King just began to dwell on it, even with this young man that he could implicitly trust guarding his life, the King began to be troubled again – with a vengeance. As the story tells us –
Whichever version, most agree that the hero’s father, whether by blood or adoption, is a gardener in the palace of the King. The child, once grown to a young man, runs errands around the palace.
One night while the King is sleeping, he has a dream which troubles him, but he keeps it to himself. We never learn what the dream is about or how and why what follows next occurs, because the story was written on baked clay tablets, and as resilient as baked clay may be, broken shit does happen. But whatever the explanation, soon enough, the king promotes our hero to be his cup-bearer.
You may think that cup-bearer was a lowly servant job – the dude that fills your wine glass, but fancier – big deal! But you’d be very wrong. Cup-bearer was a very honored and high position. In the ancient – and not so ancient – world, assassination was a constant threat to monarchs and others in high positions. On the scale of ways to assassinate such people, poisoning is pretty high up there, so the person who was in charge of filling the King’s wine cup had to be someone he could trust with his very life. You can imagine the King’s dream might have been about being poisoned, and appointing this trusted young man to pour his wine gave him some relief. Or maybe the hero’s mere presence brought him some peace of mind. There go those weird memories of stories from Sunday school again.
But in time, whether the dream came back, or the King just began to dwell on it, even with this young man that he could implicitly trust guarding his life, the King began to be troubled again – with a vengeance. As the story tells us –
“Like a lion
he urinated, sprinkling his legs, and the urine contained blood and pus. He was
troubled, he was afraid like a fish floundering in brackish water.”
At this point, the hero himself has a dream, and in the story
it specifies that he doesn’t lie down with the purpose of sleeping, but to
dream. This clarification probably means that he was acting as a seer for the
King, and it was hoped he would be given an answer to the King’s troubles in
his dream. Well, he was given an answer, but the hero’s dream is not good at
all, although technically, it would end all the King’s troubles if it came
true.
Hearing from his servants that the hero was groaning in his sleep, the King calls for him and asks if he has been sent a dream. What to do? This dream was super bad, right? The King is probably not going to be happy, but the hero decides to be honest. After all, indications are that the dream was sent by a goddess, and not just any goddess, but THE Goddess: the biggest one in their pantheon. Better not lie. So he tells the King –
Hearing from his servants that the hero was groaning in his sleep, the King calls for him and asks if he has been sent a dream. What to do? This dream was super bad, right? The King is probably not going to be happy, but the hero decides to be honest. After all, indications are that the dream was sent by a goddess, and not just any goddess, but THE Goddess: the biggest one in their pantheon. Better not lie. So he tells the King –
“My king,
this is my dream, which I will tell you about: There was a young woman, who was
as high as the heavens and as broad as the earth. She was firmly set as the
base of a wall. For me, she drowned you in a great river, a river of blood.”
Holy shit! What an awful freakin’ dream! The worst! The King doesn’t seem too fazed though. He sends the hero off. But he is totally freaking out inside, and when he calls for his chancellor he is gnawing his lip and sweating bullets, or sling stones, or whatever. He tells the chancellor, “Dude! I have to kill my cup-bearer. It’s the only way to stop this dream from coming true! What’ll we do?!”
Then they sit down and come up with a plan. The King sends a message to his chief smith. He tells the smith that he will send the hero to him with some bronze hand mirrors, and that the smith should throw the hero and the mirrors into his statuary molds. Presumably, said molds will then have molten metal poured into them or something. Whatever, it’s expected that this will be the end of the hero. The chief-smith does what the king says and gets ready to do the deed.
Once again, our modern perspective ruins some of the significance of this. What I haven’t told you yet is that this story is taking place in what we call the Early Bronze Age, which means people have only been using bronze for about 1,000 years. Before that, we used stone and copper, which is totally shit for making good, durable weapons. Smiths were then, and will continue to be for quite some time, figures of awe. They take molten metal and mysteriously turn it into weapons, containers, tools, statues. Crazy! They’re basically, freaking wizards, and frequently, in folklore and legend up until recent times, figures of menace, dread and mystery.
But there’s another factor. Most of you probably know that bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. What you probably don’t know is that another way to create bronze is to mix copper with arsenic; what is called arsenical bronze. Arsenic, like tin occurs in natural ore deposits with copper, and some of the earliest bronze was probably discovered accidentally in this way. Also, in some ways arsenical bronze is better than tin-alloyed bronze; it casts cleaner and can be hardened better. Many artifacts in the Middle East from
Holy shit! What an awful freakin’ dream! The worst! The King doesn’t seem too fazed though. He sends the hero off. But he is totally freaking out inside, and when he calls for his chancellor he is gnawing his lip and sweating bullets, or sling stones, or whatever. He tells the chancellor, “Dude! I have to kill my cup-bearer. It’s the only way to stop this dream from coming true! What’ll we do?!”
Then they sit down and come up with a plan. The King sends a message to his chief smith. He tells the smith that he will send the hero to him with some bronze hand mirrors, and that the smith should throw the hero and the mirrors into his statuary molds. Presumably, said molds will then have molten metal poured into them or something. Whatever, it’s expected that this will be the end of the hero. The chief-smith does what the king says and gets ready to do the deed.
Once again, our modern perspective ruins some of the significance of this. What I haven’t told you yet is that this story is taking place in what we call the Early Bronze Age, which means people have only been using bronze for about 1,000 years. Before that, we used stone and copper, which is totally shit for making good, durable weapons. Smiths were then, and will continue to be for quite some time, figures of awe. They take molten metal and mysteriously turn it into weapons, containers, tools, statues. Crazy! They’re basically, freaking wizards, and frequently, in folklore and legend up until recent times, figures of menace, dread and mystery.
But there’s another factor. Most of you probably know that bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. What you probably don’t know is that another way to create bronze is to mix copper with arsenic; what is called arsenical bronze. Arsenic, like tin occurs in natural ore deposits with copper, and some of the earliest bronze was probably discovered accidentally in this way. Also, in some ways arsenical bronze is better than tin-alloyed bronze; it casts cleaner and can be hardened better. Many artifacts in the Middle East from
the period of the 4th through
2nd millennium BCE are made of arsenical bronze.
Unfortunately, working with it also has the side effect of giving you arsenic poisoning, some symptoms of which -- before it kills you -- can result in erratic behavior. It’s easy to imagine how this traditional view of the smith came about. If the dude who can turn out these fantastic, almost magical items, is also frequently unhinged and says crazy shit all the time, he would naturally be a figure of dread and awe. Now, make this guy the chief smith of the King, and add in that he lives in a temple called the House of the Maiden, which is dedicated to the goddess of death, and you’ve pretty much got a cross between Dumbledore and Voldemort.
The King tells the hero, “Go take my bronze hand mirrors to the chief smith!” which the hero sets out to do. But when he gets within five to ten nindan (about 9 to 17 feet) of the temple, the Goddess appears to him, blocking his way and saying,
Unfortunately, working with it also has the side effect of giving you arsenic poisoning, some symptoms of which -- before it kills you -- can result in erratic behavior. It’s easy to imagine how this traditional view of the smith came about. If the dude who can turn out these fantastic, almost magical items, is also frequently unhinged and says crazy shit all the time, he would naturally be a figure of dread and awe. Now, make this guy the chief smith of the King, and add in that he lives in a temple called the House of the Maiden, which is dedicated to the goddess of death, and you’ve pretty much got a cross between Dumbledore and Voldemort.
The King tells the hero, “Go take my bronze hand mirrors to the chief smith!” which the hero sets out to do. But when he gets within five to ten nindan (about 9 to 17 feet) of the temple, the Goddess appears to him, blocking his way and saying,
Now, the hero
isn’t literally polluted with blood, but if you remember his dream, I guess you
could call it foreshadowing. With the Goddess forbidding him from entering the temple,
he refuses to go past the doorframe, but he meets the chief-smith there and
gives him the mirrors. The smith is like, “WTF am I supposed to do with these?”
But he’s crazy from arsenic poisoning, so he shrugs and throws them in the
molds.
When the hero shows up back at the palace, the King is frightened worse than ever. He tells the hero he is going to send him as an envoy to the neighboring king, who rules a much larger territory. But the letter he sends with the hero tells the king to kill him when he gets there.
We again lose track of the story at this point, because of more broken tablets, but it is apparent that the neighboring king does not kill the hero. In fact, the hero, as the Goddess has predicted, goes back to his home kingdom, kills the King and takes the throne.
This story, while definitely containing fantastical elements, does involve real people whose historicity is not in doubt, because we have a butt-load of evidence they existed, and from which we know it is set around the year 2270 BCE. The King was named Ur-Zababa, and he ruled the city-state of Kish in the region we know as Mesopotamia, in the area of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers; what is modern southern Iraq. The neighboring king was Lugal-Zage-Si, who ruled what was, compared to most of the polities of the time, a vast realm. And our hero? The only name we know him by is Sargon, which is Akkadian (the language of his people) for ‘true king’; not the type of name typically given out by royal gardeners to random infants they adopt after finding them floating in the Euphrates River in baskets. From this it is assumed Sargon was the name he gave himself after becoming king.
Sargon is significant to history, and our subject of warfare because he has long been credited as the founder of the first empire; the Akkadian Empire.
So, how exactly did an empire differ from other political entities that had existed up to that time? An empire is a conglomeration of nations ruled by an emperor, who usually forms said empire by conquest or political marriage -- although ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s by conquest, which means war. Some other states before that were conglomerations of existing polities forced together by a conqueror, but as far as we are sure, Sargon’s empire was the first to encompass people of disparate ethnicities.
The Akkadians spoke a now extinct language which was in the Semitic language family. The Semitic family encompasses Arabic, Amharic (spoken by Ethiopians), and Hebrew, although some Akkadian loan words and its grammatical structure still survive in Modern Aramaic, another Semitic language, which is still spoken by about 500,000 people, mainly in northwestern Iran and northern Iraq. Aramaic was brought somewhat back to the world’s attention in 2004 when Mel Gibson filmed The Passion of the Christ, most of the dialogue of which is in an older form of Aramaic.
After crowning himself king of Kish, Sargon set out to conquer Sumer, which was the land to the south, inhabited by people who spoke Sumerian. Sumerian is a language isolate, meaning that linguists have been unable to establish a familial link with any other language.
The Sumerians were responsible for some of the first city-states in the world, that began springing up in Sumer, about 2,000 years before our story takes place. The Akkadians on the other hand, are believed to have been a nomadic people who moved into the area north of Sumer, and began adopting the ways of their civilized neighbors to the south, fusing the two cultures. Akkadian civilization, up until the time of Sargon was centered on Kish.
After taking the throne of Kish, Sargon marched on Lugal-Zage-Si’s capital of Uruk and tore down its walls. Continuing south he met the massed Sumerian forces and defeated them twice. Lugal-Zage-Si was captured and if inscriptions from Sargon’s epic brag about it are accurate, he was led back to the captured city of Nippur in a dog collar. With the defeat of Ur and Umma, Sumer’s last remaining great cities, Sargon, in a symbolic gesture, washed his bloodied weapons in the Persian Gulf.
With all of Sumer conquered he followed up by attacking Kazallu, a Semitic-speaking kingdom to the west, reducing their city to rubble so that “. . . there was not even a perch for a bird left”. Then he turned his attention to the northwest and east, conquering other Semitic-speaking peoples as far away as what is now southern Turkey, and also subduing the Elamite people, to the east in what is now Iran, whose language is another isolate.
More importantly than his conquests, Sargon set about administering his new empire, and he did so in a style that would be mirrored by later successful empire-builders. As administrators, he placed Akkadian governors over the various provinces, and established the Akkadian language, which he standardized, as the common tongue of the realm. But in the area of culture, for the most part he left the conquered people their time-honored institutions, and most importantly, their religions. Sumerians, Elamites, Amorites, Assyrians; all were left to worship their old gods, as long as they remained loyal to Sargon. Religious freedom!
He established trade throughout his empire, and some sources say that it was in the interest of commerce that he fought against the Indo-European speaking Hittites in what is now central Turkey. Some sources say he even attacked what is now the island of Cyprus, although the latter story may come from confusion between Sargon the Great and Sargon II of Assyria, who ruled another empire about 1,500 years later.
He ruled from the capital city of Akkad, which he had caused to be built, or at least expanded dramatically. As the tutelary god of Akkad, Sargon set up the goddess who had metaphorically drowned king Ur-Zababa in blood and placed Sargon on the throne; the goddess of fertility and war: Innana in Sumerian, Ishtar in Akkadian, Astarte in the Hellenized form of that name, as she was worshiped by the Canaanites and Phoenicians. Most scholars now believe her worship was transmitted to Cyprus, where she eventually became the love goddess of the Greeks, Aphrodite, although this theory was met by widespread skepticism in the 19th century when it was first proposed. Aphrodite went on to be absorbed by and strongly influence the cult of the Roman goddess, Venus, who you’re all doubtless familiar with. So, the goddess who set Sargon on the throne still lives on in our sky, as well as countless cultural artifacts, ranging from Renaissance paintings to Japanese manga, and even briefly, the film This Is Spinal Tap.
If the dates can be trusted, Sargon ruled his empire for around 55 years, which means he must have been a fairly old man, especially for the standards of the time, when rebellion broke out throughout the empire. No one is sure why. It could have been famine, plague, religious unrest, or any other number of factors, but in the end it didn’t matter, because Sargon put them all down –
When the hero shows up back at the palace, the King is frightened worse than ever. He tells the hero he is going to send him as an envoy to the neighboring king, who rules a much larger territory. But the letter he sends with the hero tells the king to kill him when he gets there.
We again lose track of the story at this point, because of more broken tablets, but it is apparent that the neighboring king does not kill the hero. In fact, the hero, as the Goddess has predicted, goes back to his home kingdom, kills the King and takes the throne.
This story, while definitely containing fantastical elements, does involve real people whose historicity is not in doubt, because we have a butt-load of evidence they existed, and from which we know it is set around the year 2270 BCE. The King was named Ur-Zababa, and he ruled the city-state of Kish in the region we know as Mesopotamia, in the area of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers; what is modern southern Iraq. The neighboring king was Lugal-Zage-Si, who ruled what was, compared to most of the polities of the time, a vast realm. And our hero? The only name we know him by is Sargon, which is Akkadian (the language of his people) for ‘true king’; not the type of name typically given out by royal gardeners to random infants they adopt after finding them floating in the Euphrates River in baskets. From this it is assumed Sargon was the name he gave himself after becoming king.
Sargon is significant to history, and our subject of warfare because he has long been credited as the founder of the first empire; the Akkadian Empire.
So, how exactly did an empire differ from other political entities that had existed up to that time? An empire is a conglomeration of nations ruled by an emperor, who usually forms said empire by conquest or political marriage -- although ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s by conquest, which means war. Some other states before that were conglomerations of existing polities forced together by a conqueror, but as far as we are sure, Sargon’s empire was the first to encompass people of disparate ethnicities.
The Akkadians spoke a now extinct language which was in the Semitic language family. The Semitic family encompasses Arabic, Amharic (spoken by Ethiopians), and Hebrew, although some Akkadian loan words and its grammatical structure still survive in Modern Aramaic, another Semitic language, which is still spoken by about 500,000 people, mainly in northwestern Iran and northern Iraq. Aramaic was brought somewhat back to the world’s attention in 2004 when Mel Gibson filmed The Passion of the Christ, most of the dialogue of which is in an older form of Aramaic.
After crowning himself king of Kish, Sargon set out to conquer Sumer, which was the land to the south, inhabited by people who spoke Sumerian. Sumerian is a language isolate, meaning that linguists have been unable to establish a familial link with any other language.
The Sumerians were responsible for some of the first city-states in the world, that began springing up in Sumer, about 2,000 years before our story takes place. The Akkadians on the other hand, are believed to have been a nomadic people who moved into the area north of Sumer, and began adopting the ways of their civilized neighbors to the south, fusing the two cultures. Akkadian civilization, up until the time of Sargon was centered on Kish.
After taking the throne of Kish, Sargon marched on Lugal-Zage-Si’s capital of Uruk and tore down its walls. Continuing south he met the massed Sumerian forces and defeated them twice. Lugal-Zage-Si was captured and if inscriptions from Sargon’s epic brag about it are accurate, he was led back to the captured city of Nippur in a dog collar. With the defeat of Ur and Umma, Sumer’s last remaining great cities, Sargon, in a symbolic gesture, washed his bloodied weapons in the Persian Gulf.
With all of Sumer conquered he followed up by attacking Kazallu, a Semitic-speaking kingdom to the west, reducing their city to rubble so that “. . . there was not even a perch for a bird left”. Then he turned his attention to the northwest and east, conquering other Semitic-speaking peoples as far away as what is now southern Turkey, and also subduing the Elamite people, to the east in what is now Iran, whose language is another isolate.
More importantly than his conquests, Sargon set about administering his new empire, and he did so in a style that would be mirrored by later successful empire-builders. As administrators, he placed Akkadian governors over the various provinces, and established the Akkadian language, which he standardized, as the common tongue of the realm. But in the area of culture, for the most part he left the conquered people their time-honored institutions, and most importantly, their religions. Sumerians, Elamites, Amorites, Assyrians; all were left to worship their old gods, as long as they remained loyal to Sargon. Religious freedom!
He established trade throughout his empire, and some sources say that it was in the interest of commerce that he fought against the Indo-European speaking Hittites in what is now central Turkey. Some sources say he even attacked what is now the island of Cyprus, although the latter story may come from confusion between Sargon the Great and Sargon II of Assyria, who ruled another empire about 1,500 years later.
He ruled from the capital city of Akkad, which he had caused to be built, or at least expanded dramatically. As the tutelary god of Akkad, Sargon set up the goddess who had metaphorically drowned king Ur-Zababa in blood and placed Sargon on the throne; the goddess of fertility and war: Innana in Sumerian, Ishtar in Akkadian, Astarte in the Hellenized form of that name, as she was worshiped by the Canaanites and Phoenicians. Most scholars now believe her worship was transmitted to Cyprus, where she eventually became the love goddess of the Greeks, Aphrodite, although this theory was met by widespread skepticism in the 19th century when it was first proposed. Aphrodite went on to be absorbed by and strongly influence the cult of the Roman goddess, Venus, who you’re all doubtless familiar with. So, the goddess who set Sargon on the throne still lives on in our sky, as well as countless cultural artifacts, ranging from Renaissance paintings to Japanese manga, and even briefly, the film This Is Spinal Tap.
If the dates can be trusted, Sargon ruled his empire for around 55 years, which means he must have been a fairly old man, especially for the standards of the time, when rebellion broke out throughout the empire. No one is sure why. It could have been famine, plague, religious unrest, or any other number of factors, but in the end it didn’t matter, because Sargon put them all down –
“Sargon went
onward to battle and defeated them; he accomplished their overthrow, and their
wide-spreading host he destroyed. Afterward he attacked the land of Subartu in
his might, and they submitted to his arms, and Sargon settled that revolt, and
defeated them; he accomplished their overthrow, and their wide-spreading host
he destroyed, and he brought their possessions into Akkad.”
Not bad for
a guy probably in his fifties or sixties.
Finally, around 2215 BCE he died, presumably of natural causes, although for all we know he could have died wrestling a lion or something else hardcore epic like that. He left the empire to his son Rimush, and it lasted another 60 or so years, but out of its ruin and the period of chaos that followed sprang two empires that would go on to be significant influences on history: the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires, both of which I will someday doubtless get around to talking about.
Of Akkad, home city of Ishtar, and the center of power of her favored son, Sargon, no one now even knows where it was located, since its existence is only attested to in writing; lost, both figuratively and literally, to the sands of time. Before he died Sargon issued an epic, Hulk-Hogan, WWE-like challenge to all the would-be conquerors that would come after him –
Finally, around 2215 BCE he died, presumably of natural causes, although for all we know he could have died wrestling a lion or something else hardcore epic like that. He left the empire to his son Rimush, and it lasted another 60 or so years, but out of its ruin and the period of chaos that followed sprang two empires that would go on to be significant influences on history: the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires, both of which I will someday doubtless get around to talking about.
Of Akkad, home city of Ishtar, and the center of power of her favored son, Sargon, no one now even knows where it was located, since its existence is only attested to in writing; lost, both figuratively and literally, to the sands of time. Before he died Sargon issued an epic, Hulk-Hogan, WWE-like challenge to all the would-be conquerors that would come after him –
“. . . now,
any king who wants to call himself my equal, wherever I conquered, let him go!”
But History
was like, “Okay, Sargon dude, big words, but no one is even going to remember
where your capital city was in 2,000 years.” Harsh, History; very harsh.
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