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While the Sumerian princes were engaged in mutual war, the Semites were occupying northern Babylonia, and establishing their power in the city of Agadê or Akkad, not far from Sippara. Here, in B.C. 3800, arose the empire of Sargani-sar-ali, better known to posterity as "Sargon" of Akkad. He became the hero of the Semitic race in Babylonia.
It was they that embanked the Nile, turned morasses into meadows and piled the pyramids. More exactly, it was by their commands that these miracles were contrived. To the neolithic people whom they subjugated their divinity was clear. So elsewhere was that of the kings of Akkad.
Ishtar, described in an Assyrian inscription as Our Lady of Girdles, was the original Venus, as Gilgames was perhaps the prototype of Hercules. The legend of his labours is represented on a seal of Sargon of Akkad, a king who ruled fifty-seven hundred years ago. In the epic, Gilgames, betrayed by Ishtar, tried to find out how not to die.
The balance of proof rests in favor of the former supposition; but however that may be, Sumer and Akkad represent, from a certain period on, a general designation to include the whole of Babylonia.
A stone in the British Museum brought from this locality has the name of Sargon I., king of Akkad, is reliably vouched for as coming down from the year 3800 B.C. He reigned fourteen years, which were taken up in wars with Assyria, in which the latter got the best of it in the end.
Babylonia was not yet united under a single head. From time to time some prince arose whose conquests allowed him to claim the imperial title of "king of Sumer and Akkad," of Southern and Northern Babylonia, but the claim was never of long duration, and often it signified no more than a supremacy over the other rulers of the country.
But the heritage of "Rûm" is not the final factor in the Ottoman Empire as it exists to-day; for after the successors of Osman had founded their military monarchy with blood and iron on the ruins of one-third of Europe, they turned eastwards, with a genuinely Oriental gesture, and overran kingdoms and lands with the apparently mechanical impetus of all Asiatic conquerors, from Sargon of Akkad and Cyrus the Persian to Jenghis Khan and Timur.
The standard work on astronomy and astrology, in seventy-two books, had been compiled for the library of Sargon of Akkad; so too had the standard work on terrestrial omens. There was also a standard work on medicine, in which medical prescriptions and spells were mixed together. Philological treatises were numerous.
Sumer and Akkad, pp. 322 ff.; and for a full discussion of the points of resemblance between the early Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations, see Sayce, The Archaeology of the Cuneiform Inscriptions, chap. iv, pp. 101 ff. The latter line of contact is suggested by an interesting piece of evidence that has recently been obtained.
It was one of the traits of the pharaohs, as it was also of the Incas, to believe, or at least to assert, that their fathers, therefore themselves, were divine. As a consequence of the idea they prayed to their own images and likened their palaces to inns. Originally foreigners, invaders from Akkad or Sumer, the pharaohs first conquered, then surprised.
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