Akkadians: who they were and what their Mesopotamian civilization was like

Considered the founders of the first empire as a regime that subjected other peoples, the Akkadians are one of the most peculiar cultures in all of history.

With their capital in Acad, founded by King Sargon, the Acadians were conquering practically all of Mesopotamia, leaving a deep imprint in the region and, furthermore, creating some of the myths that are fundamental in the tradition christian.

Next we will discover who were the akkadians, its known history, its religion and a bit about its language.

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Who were the Akkadians?

The Akkadians were the inhabitants of the vast empire founded by Sargon, with its capital in the city of Acad. This town was characterized by being one of the first to have founded a state that corresponds to the idea of ​​empire as a regime that culturally, religiously and economically submits to other peoples.

the akkadians They were one of several civilizations that developed in the prosperous region of the fertile crescent

, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a place where other Mesopotamian peoples such as the Sumerians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Hittites and Ammonites inhabited.

History of the Akkadian Empire

Before the appearance of the Akkadians and their vast empire Mesopotamia was made up of many city-states, each with its own king, sphere of influence, and culture.. If the culture and political system of these cities was similar, they all clashed occasionally for more resources. Those cities that managed to exert more influence within the Mesopotamian world were those that They managed to make their culture the most prestigious, although without directly governing the entire region.

To the south of Mesopotamia lived the Sumerians, while to the north it was occupied by people who spoke Semitic, a language that would evolve into Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic. Despite the fact that the Semitic languages ​​and Sumerian were already quite different languages ​​at that time, about 4,000 years ago, their speakers shared many cultural characteristics, with which one could more or less say that the Mesopotamian cultures constituted, roughly, the same civilization.

Around 2400, King Eannatum, ruler of the city of Lagash, who had defeated the armies of Uruk and Ur, stood out in Sumer. The city of Lagash exercised an important power for more than a century, coming to dominate a territory of about 4,500 kilometers squares. Its last king was Urukagina, who ascended to the throne around 2,350 BC. c. At that time the Semites created a powerful kingdom with its capital in Ebla, present-day Syria. This city would dominate many cities in Anatolia and Upper Mesopotamia. In turn, the city of Mari began to dominate other cities around it, including Assur.

Returning to the city of Lagash, it seems that its king, Urukagina, was an enlightened character who tried to reduce the excessive power of the priests, to give greater representation and well-being to their town. However, the priests were not willing to lose their influence and, taking advantage of the fact that the people feared the gods more than their king, they made the king lose strength.

This caused the prosperous city of Lagash to end up weakened by its internal quarrels. and the city of Umma, his old rival, took advantage of the occasion to take revenge for all the defeats and humiliations that city had put him through. So the king of Umma, Lugalzagesi, gradually seized the cities of Ur and Uruk, then attacked Lagash in 2330, and soon this king would have power over all of Sumer.

Another city, Kish, had been getting great splendor while the other cities weakened and fought in separate wars. While Lugalzagesi ruled Uruk and all of Sumer, the prime minister of the king of Kish managed to usurp the throne. This new ruler took the name Sargon, which means "the legitimate or true king.". Naturally, not everyone saw him as the true king, so he decided to move the court to a new capital, free from the influences of the previous monarchy.

This new city would be Agade, better known as Acad, and its foundation would be the moment in which the seed of what would later be the vast Akkadian Empire would be sown. Thus, in 2,300 Sargon faced Lugalzagesi, defeating him and taking away all power over Sumer in a very short time. Mesopotamia fell into the hands of the king of Akkad and gave its name to the new culture of the Akkadians.

As Sargon was fighting and subduing more cities, the capital, Acad, was growing. Some cities, taking advantage of the fact that the city-states that had invaded them were too busy fighting Sargon, achieved independence. But this freedom was temporary: sooner or later, the Akkadian armies appeared before these new states and turned them into tributary cities of Akkad. Thus, the Akkadian empire was becoming a vast multicultural empire.

Due to its cultural diversity and the desire to homogenize the lands conquered by Sargon, the Akkadian Empire is considered the first historical empire in the sense of a people that dominated others militarily, culturally and economically towns. This is not the case of the Egyptians of that time who, despite the size of their country, were quite homogeneous and had not yet subjected other peoples by imposing their culture on them. The Akkadians harshly oppressed the conquered peoples.

To the south, the rulers of Sumer's cities were ousted and replaced by brutal warriors of Akkadian origin, which, naturally, did not arouse sympathy for the conquering king Sargon. Likewise, the monarch knew how to put down the revolts and continued in his intention to standardize the empire, making making Akkadian the official language of the country, especially on the most important matters, and taking steps to encourage it. His intention was to displace the language that, until then, had been the vehicle of culture and prestige: Sumerian.

Around 2280 Sargon of Acad died. Immediately, Sumer and the peoples of the Zagros Mountains tried to free themselves from the Akkadian yoke, taking advantage of the death of the tyrant, however, the new king, Rimush, Sargon's eldest son, with the help of his brother Manishtusu put down the riots. In 2252 Naram-Sin, Sargon's grandson, occupies the throne of Acad and manages to quell several internal revolts, in addition to continuing the family tradition of expanding the empire and subduing new peoples.

So that, Naram-Sin overthrew the flourishing kingdom of Ebla in 2200 and, to consolidate its power, proclaimed himself a god in addition to organizing a body of noble-functionaries who supervised the local kings and made sure that cities suspected of treason were duly reprimanded. Culture flourished at court during his reign, with scribes developing and surpassing Sumerian traditions and, although the Sumerian language continued to have influence, Akkadian had succeeded in displacing it in administration and relations commercial.

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their mythology

The Akkadian culture fed heavily on the Sumerian when configuring its myths. The Akkadian worldview is especially interesting since, especially in the Christian world, there are several current myths that were believed in the ancient Akkadian Empire.

the universal deluge

The historical events of the Akkadians we know thanks to the fact that, from the year 2,800 a. C., the Sumerians began to systematically use writing for historical and literary purposes. This fact surprised both the Sumerians and the Akkadians centuries later, who were surprised by the total absence of records prior to that time and, before imagining that writing did not exist before that date or that there were few literate scholars, they decided to give it an explanation. mythological.

So they conjectured that the lack of written records must have been caused by a great Universal Flood, which occurred before 2800 AD and which had destroyed all previous written sources. Both Sumerians and Akkadians located all their legends in the time before this deluge..

According to his worldview, the world had been created in just seven days. There were seven days because astronomers identified seven main celestial bodies, apart from the stars: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. These stars were part of the Sumerian and Akkadian pantheon, and it was believed that they influenced the destiny of men.

The fate of people depended on the star that dominated the sky on the day and time of their birth. Each day was named according to the star that dominated its first hour, and thus the division of time into weeks of seven days arose.

Following the belief of the Universal Flood, the list of Sumerian kings was completed with ten monarchs prior to this event, who were attributed reigns of tens of thousands of years. The last and most famous of these kings was Gilgamesh, King of Uruk.

The legend of this Gilgamesh is based on the historical Gilgamesh, who reigned around 2700, but was he claimed to have been born several centuries before, he survived the Flood that had been caused by the gods, very angry. When his friend died, he began to search for the secret of eternal life, going through a long series of adventures.

Another of the survivors of this mythological flood was Utnapishtim who built a boat in which he and his family were saved.. After the deluge the gods had no men to offer themselves for sacred sacrifices and feed them, so Utnapishtim sacrificed animals as offerings. In gratitude the gods granted him the gift of immortality.

Utnapishtim met Gilgamesh, still searching for the secret of eternal life. He told her that he should look for a magical plant. Gilgamesh found it, but as he was about to eat it, a snake stole it and ate it, which is why snakes rejuvenate when they shed their skin.

Babel's tower

The arrival of the conquering Akkadians in the cities of Sumer, in which Sumerian was the language of culture, caused great confusion.. Firstly, because the people did not quite understand why they were being cruelly invaded, and secondly, because the conquerors spoke in a very strange, almost unintelligible way. It is probable that the humblest people of the conquered cities, whose vision of the world was reduced to their most immediately, they did not even understand why men of unknown speech had suddenly appeared, a language that they were now forced to to learn.

Given the cruelty of the war and the unfairness of the conquest no wonder the conquered Sumerians thought they were being punished by the gods. This idea would take shape over the centuries, despite the fact that Acad and Sumer would end up being erased in the popular mind, their ancestral temples, the ziggurats, would remain there.

Thus, in Mesopotamia the idea would begin to emerge that the ancients built tall temples to get closer to the gods, an idea that did not is not at all wrong, since it is a common pattern in all religions to build high places of worship to touch the realm of the Heavens. People interpreted that this human attempt to get closer to the divine did not please the gods and, as punishment, the deities sowed confusion among humans by making them speak hundreds of languages different.

It is from this legend that the myth of the tower of Babel arises. The ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who built taller and taller ziggurats, stopped building them when the gods made them speak different languages., could not understand each other and could not collaborate building the towers.

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The religion of the Akkadians

The Akkadians, as in the other first great civilizations, practiced a religion polytheistic, which had many points in common with that professed by other Mesopotamian peoples, especially the sumerians.

Religion acquired great importance when it came to politically and socially organizing the Empire, and there was a powerful priestly hierarchy where the ruler was considered the representative of the gods on Earth, something like the Pope is in Catholicism.

The Akkadian gods were generally related to different natural phenomena. There are many gods that make up the Akkadian pantheon, but the following can be considered the most important:

1. An or Anu

The god An he was the god of heaven and was the supreme ruler of all gods. Under his command were different phenomena related to the heavens, such as stars and constellations. This god in the Sumerian mythology from which he originated was represented as a celestial dome that covered the earth. The Akkadians inherited this representation and, as the supreme god, it was among his tasks to judge human and divine crimes, and he had to impose punishments for them.

2. Enlil or Bea

The god Enlil has prominent importance not only in the Akkadian worldview, but also in the Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Hittite worldviews. enlil he was the god associated with winds, storms and breathing. He is also the father of several natural divinities, such as the god of the Moon or the goddess of wheat. Due to his close relationship with the goddess of agriculture, Enlil, also in charge of storms and, therefore, of rain, he was one of the most prominent gods in the Akkadian pantheon.

3. Sin or Nanna

Sin was the god of the Moon, who was called Nanna in Sumerian culture. He was the main god of the city of Ur and during the period of splendor of this city-state the god Sin acquired almost greater importance than An. also an important adjudication as god of wisdom and related arts, especially astronomy and astrological divinations.

4. utu

Utu was the sun god. The sun was fundamental in the Akkadian culture, since its economy was based on agriculture and the harvests depended on how benign or suffocating the sun was. He was also considered the god of justice and truth, since the sun sees everything and knows everything.

5. Ishtar

Ishtar, from which the name Esther comes, is the best-known Mesopotamian goddess today, especially for the famous remains dedicated to her that are kept in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Ishar was the goddess of fertility, love, sex, and passionate warfare. She has been credited with having possessed numerous lovers and it is believed that she worshiped him with rituals of sacred prostitution.

akkadian language

The Akkadian language, in Akkadian “lišānum akkadītum”𒀝𒂵𒌈, is currently extinct and so is its writing system. It was mainly spoken in ancient Mesopotamia by both the Assyrians and the Babylonians during the 2nd millennium BC. c. and, naturally, the Akkadians who were conquering various Sumerian and Semitic peoples. As we have mentioned, it became the official language of the Akkadian Empire, trying to displace Sumerian and forcing the conquered peoples to learn it as a method of standardizing the state.

The Akkadian language reached Mesopotamia from the north, with the Semitic peoples.. The first Akkadian proper names are found in Sumerian texts from 2,800 BC. C., which indicates that, at least, Akkadian-speaking people had already settled in Mesopotamian lands. The first tablets written entirely in the Akkadian language using the cuneiform system date from 2,400 BC. C., but there is no significant use of this language in its written form before 2,300 BC. C., coinciding with the appearance of the Acadian Empire of Sargon.

Thanks to the vast power of the Akkadian Empire and its spirit of imposition of this language, the Akkadian language eventually relegated Sumerian in legal and religious contexts, becoming the dominant language in Mesopotamia for almost 1000 years. In addition, it became the lingua franca in commercial and diplomatic relations, being used by the Egyptian pharaohs when they spoke with the Hittite kings.

The Akkadian vocabulary is mostly of Semitic origin. Next we will see some examples of words in this extinct language:

• Mother: um-um
• House: bit-um
• Blood: dam-um
• Dog: kalb-um
• King: malk-um
• Head: rēš-um
• Day: um-um

Bibliographic references:

• Liverani, Mario, ed. (1993). Akkad: The First World Empire: Structure, Ideology Traditions". Padua: Sargon srl. ISBN 978-8-81120-468-8
• Oates, Joan (2004). Archeology in Mesopotamia: Digging Deeper at Tell Brak. 2004 Albert Reckitt Archaeological Lecture. In Proceedings of the British Academy: 2004 Lectures; Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-19726-351-8.