Akkad

The endonym for Akkad, in the very language the empire named. Akkadû is the land and people of Akkad, written in the Sargonic period and after with the logogram URI(KI) as well as syllabically; from it comes akkadû as an adjective, “Akkadian,” and so the modern name of the East Semitic language itself. The land is māt Akkadî, “the country of Akkad,” after the royal city Agade that Sargon made his capital around 2334 BCE. The name is attested across the whole sweep of Mesopotamian writing, from the royal inscriptions of Sargon and Naram-Sin through more than a millennium and a half of later use, for it did not die with the empire: the title šar māt Šumeri u Akkadî, “king of Sumer and Akkad,” was claimed by Mesopotamian rulers down to the Neo-Babylonian and Persian kings, and Cyrus took it on the cylinder that announced his conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE. The form is one name across the two dialects of Akkadian: Assyrian and Babylonian divide the language between them, but a Neo-Assyrian king writing at Nineveh and a Neo-Babylonian king writing at Babylon set down the same māt Akkadî, so the single Akkadian entry here carries both the Assyrian and the Babylonian name for Akkad.

Akkadû is the rare name that outgrew the thing it named, becoming a word for a language and an age rather than a place. The empire lasted a century and a half; the adjective built from its name has lasted into the present as the term for the entire Semitic literary tradition of Mesopotamia, Old Akkadian through Babylonian and Assyrian alike. The land-name took the same path that this atlas records for its neighbor: by the later second millennium māt Akkadî had ceased to mean the Sargonic heartland and come to mean Babylonia at large, so that the name of the first empire was inherited by the kingdom that supplanted it, the way an old family name passes to a younger house. Akkad is named, in the end, less as a country than as the origin of a language and an idea of empire.

The Sumerian name for Sargon’s capital, Agade, written a-ga-de₃ with the place-determinative ki. The form is of uncertain, possibly pre-Sumerian and pre-Semitic origin, a substrate name that neither Sumerian nor Akkadian etymologizes convincingly, fitting a city that appears suddenly as the seat of a new kind of kingdom. It is best known from the Curse of Agade, a Sumerian literary composition of the Ur III period that tells how Naram-Sin offended the god Enlil and how Agade was condemned to ruin in punishment, a poem copied in scribal schools for centuries after the city itself was gone.

Agade is the name of a place that cannot be pointed to. Despite more than a century of searching, the capital of the world’s first empire has never been located, somewhere on the Euphrates between Sippar and Kish by the best guesses, and so the city survives only as a written name, in Sumerian poems that mourn it and Akkadian inscriptions that boast of it. The Curse of Agade gave the name an afterlife as a moral example, the great city brought low for its king’s impiety, the archetype of the ruin of capitals that Mesopotamian literature would return to again and again. Of all the entries in this atlas, Agade may be the only one whose place on the map is, two thousand years of digging later, still entirely unknown.

The Biblical Hebrew name for Akkad, ʾAkkaḏ, the form in which the name of the first empire survived in the one tradition outside cuneiform that preserved it. It appears exactly once in the Hebrew Bible, in the Table of Nations at Genesis 10:10, where Akkad is named with Babel and Erech as the beginning of Nimrod’s kingdom in the land of Shinar. The form keeps the doubled k of Akkadian Akkadû, and its appearance beside Babel and Erech, Babylon and Uruk, preserves a memory of the three as the great cities of the southern Mesopotamian plain, though by the time Genesis was written Akkad had been a ruin for well over a thousand years.

ʾAkkaḏ is the single thread by which the name of the first empire reached the modern world before the spade. Every other ancient witness to Akkad is in cuneiform, lost from the moment the script died until its decipherment in the nineteenth century; only this one verse carried the name Akkad unbroken through the long centuries when no one could read the clay. When Assyriologists recovered the Sargonic empire from its inscriptions, they had a name ready for it, because Genesis had kept Akkad alive in a verse memorized and copied for two and a half millennia. The first empire owes its English name not to its own vast records but to a single word in a list of cities in the book of Genesis.