ABSTRACT
Akkadian king who established one of the world’s earliest and most influential empires in Southwest Asia during the twenty-fourth and twenty-third centuries b.c.e. Starting from his home city-state of Akkad, in what is now central Iraq, Sargon united virtually all of Mesopotamia—a region stretching from Asia Minor to the Persian Gulf—under his rule. Sargon’s conquests and trading initiatives spread his native Akkadian culture throughout the region and as far as modern-day Syria and Turkey. Later Mesopotamian civilizations drew heavily upon these Akkadian cultural and social models. The Assyrians, who established a later kingdom based in what is now northern Iraq, even claimed Sargon as an ancestor of their own kings.
