Once the south of Mesopotamia was under his control, he then went on to create the first multi-national empire in history.

Sargon's relatively easy conquest of the area (not to mention his constant carping on his own non-aristocratic background) may reveal a successful appeal to the downtrodden members of Sumerian society to come over to his side (99).Д«y presenting himself as a 'man of the people', he was able to garner support for his cause and took Sumer with relative ease. used their combined religious and secular power to claim as much as three-quarters of the land in any given city for themselves. Sargon's relatively speedy conquest of the entire Mesopotamian plain is startling, given the inability of Sumerian kings to control any area much larger than two or three cities were suffering from an increased gap between elite leadership and poor laborers. The historian Susan Wise Bauer writes on this, commenting: Further complicating the situation was the discrepancy between the rich and the poor. Prior to Lugalzagesi's conquest, Sumerian cities were frequently at war with each other, vying for resources such as water and land rights. In Sargon's case, it would have been to his benefit, as an aspiring conqueror and empire builder, to claim for himself a humble birth and modest upbringing.ДЄt the time Sargon came to power in 2334 BCE, Sumer was a region which had only recently been united under the king of Umma, Lugalzagesi, and even then it was not a cohesive union. Other naru literature, such as The Great Revolt and the Legend of Sargon, seeks to tell a tale of a great king's military victory or life. Naru literature such as The Legend of Cutha (or derivatives from naru literature such as The Curse of Agade) uses a well-known historical figure (in both cases Naram-Sin, Sargon's grandson) to make a point concerning the proper relationship between a human being (especially a king) and the gods. In these works the form of the naru is retained, but the matter is legendary or even fictitious (93).Д®ven though the extant legend was written long after Sargon's death, it is thought that it conveys the story Sargon would have presented regarding his birth, upbringing, and reign. A well-known example is the Legend of Sargon of Akkad. The so-called 'naru literature' consists of a small group of apocryphal naru-inscriptions, composed probably in the early second millennium B.C., but in the name of famous kings of a bygone age. In creating this legend, Sargon carefully distanced himself from the kings of the past (who claimed divine right) and aligned himself with the common people of the region rather than the ruling elite.ДЄ naru was an engraved stele, on which a king would record the events of his reign the characteristic features of such an inscription are a formal self-introduction of the writer by his name and titles, a narrative in the first person, and an epilogue usually consisting of curses upon any person who might in the future deface the monument and blessings upon those who should honour it. She had sealed the basket with tar, and the water carried him safely to where he was later found by a man named Akki who was a gardener for Ur-Zababa, the king of the Sumerian city of Kish. His mother could not reveal her pregnancy or keep the child, and so she placed him in a basket which she then let go on the Euphrates River. According to the cuneiform inscription known as The Legend of Sargon (his autobiography), he was born the illegitimate son of a 'changeling', which could refer to a temple priestess of the goddess Inanna (whose clergy were androgynous) and never knew his father. Instead of representing himself as a man chosen by the gods to rule, he presented a much humbler image of himself as an orphan set adrift in life who was taken in by a kind gardener and granted the love of the goddess Inanna. While he was clearly a brilliant military leader, it was the story he told of his youth and rise to power that exerted a powerful influence over the Sumerians he sought to conquer. Sargon of Akkad (also known as Sargon of Agade and Sargon the Great, reigned 2334 to 2279 BCE), the founder of the Akkadian Empire, was a man keenly aware of his times and the people he would rule over.

The black legend summary