THE REIGN OF SARGON

With the appearance of this imposing figure, vast but dim to later generations of Babylonians hardly less than to us, the historical memory of the people was enriched with its most abiding treasure. Yet the written tradition, so far as it is at present available to us, does scant justice to a king who could not only achieve greatness but could record it for posterity more clearly than any before and most after him. The inscriptions of Sargon must have been numerous and their remains show that they were informative and detailed as to his warlike and religious, possibly even his civil, transactions. With a different language something of a new spirit came into the records, and seemed for a time to overcome the historical reticence which is so disappointingly manifest in other not inglorious periods of the nation's experience. The inscriptions are mostly lost or not yet recovered, though a few remain in copies made by scribes who perused the statues and trophies laid up in the great central shrine at Nippur. The Sumerian king-list spares but two or three remarks upon the founder himself and relapses into its customary tale of names and numbers for the rest of the Dynasty of Agade; and all else is anecdote preserved and perhaps adapted for special ends.

A miraculous or a mysterious origin is essential to superhuman characters, and Sargon was the first to show that the taste of the ancient eastern peoples was to be for the latter. Like several notable successors he had, and did not disguise, an obscure birth and a humble beginning.