Archaeological Finds That Rewrote Our Understanding of History

An Archaeological Find That Allowed Us to See the Face of History’s First Empire Builder

We might know what Sargon looked like. A 1931 archaeological discovery in Nineveh, Iraq, found a mask of what is believed to be his likeness. In Sargon’s era, there was a great and growing wealth gap between powerful aristocrats, who controlled three fourths of the land, and the commoners who eked a living from what was left. Aware that the commoners resented the exploitative nobility, Sargon presented himself as a fellow commoner of humble origins. Per The Legend of Sargon of Akkad, recounted in an ancient stele from circa 2300 BC, Sargon presented himself as an orphan. He was an illegitimate child of a temple priestess, or holy prostitute. As he put it at the start of the narrative: “Sargon, the mighty king, king of Akkad, am I. My mother was a changeling, my father I knew not“.

A millennium before the Old Testament’s Moses story, Sargon recounted that as a baby his mother had placed him in a basket, and set him adrift on the Euphrates River. He was found by a kind gardener of a Sumerian city’s king, who raised him as his own. Later, when he began his rise, Sargon presented himself as a man of the people. That earned him the support of the commoners. Unfortunately, Sargon seems to have screwed over the commoners once he secured power with their help. His reign was not always popular with the masses, and he spent much of it putting down revolts. Still, he established a powerful empire – history’s first – that lasted for nearly two centuries. Not bad for an illegitimate orphan abandoned on a river by his mother.

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