There have been quite a few great empires in the ancient world. When I say ancient, in this case I mean pre Rome. Picking this cutoff was completely arbitrary. I am not saying that Rome was not a great ancient empire, indeed it was one of the very greatest and had things that not even everyone today has. I am referring to central heating and running water, just to mention a few. Before Rome there were other great cities and countries and even city countries, that were extremely powerful and influential in their day. The ancient Egyptians are a perfect example of this. We all know that they were geniuses when it came to creating structures. So much so, that some of the things they built used processes that we still can't figure out today. One has just to listen to the different theories on how the Great Pyramid was built to understand what I am talking about. There has to be at least 5 or 6 strong theories on its construction and several weaker theories. It makes you wonder how such a ancient people could have constructed anything that we couldn't figure out? This is nothing new however, we tried to figure out how Damascus steel was made for many years before we hit upon the formula in the 1960s.

When we look for one of the first empires, we have to look toward Mesopotamia around 2350 B.C. There were other countries that had tried to build bigger kingdoms, but many credit Mesopotamia and Sargon The Great, as being the first true empire builder. The Mesopotamian military tradition was founded by Sargon. How did we ever find out that Sargon even existed? Records were found, that were in cuneiform, from Mesopotamia. They contained the tales of Sargon and were considered the ancient history of Mesopotamia. Wouldn't it be funny if it was all fiction? This doesn't seem to be the fact, since some of the data in the records can be verified.

Sargon was said to have been a man who was found by a gardner, after someone had put him in a basket and sent it floating down the river. Wow, this is a dead ringer for the tale of Moses in the bible, only it is much older. Records from the actual time of Sargon's life have never been located and this is credited to the fact that the city of Agade, which was Sargon's capital city and built by Sargon, has never been found. Sargon's mother may have been a priestess and most lean to this fact. He made it into civil service and attained the position of cupbearer in Kish. Lugalzaggisi of Uruk, was a leader who had united all the city states of Sumer, the country where Kish was located. Sargon became the leader after Lugalzaggisi was defeated. He was lucky in this respect, he got a country not just a city, since Lugalzaggisi had united the city states already, giving Sargon a powerful pool of people from which to draw wealth and soldiers. Things didn't work out the way Sargon thought that they would, he didn't get that wealth and those soldiers right away. As fate would have it, the city states decided that this was their chance to break away from the empire. Sargon had to retake each city state and he did. Could this have convinced Sargon that he was unbeatable, because he did recapture all those places again? We may never know what drove Sargon past reuniting his country, because there are not many records in existence from this period and region.

Sargon certainly was not content with what he had did and now decided that he could defeat other cities, cities that were not part of his empire. He began by conquering the cities along the middle Euphrates and continued his trek up to northern Syria and into the mountains of southern Anatolia. He wanted those mountains because they contained large deposits of silver and even in those days silver was a precious commodity. He traveled to Susa and captured that. This was the capital of the Elamites and was located in the Zagros Mountains in western Iran. There is a story, that has been recorded, that Sargon was asked to settle a dispute in a city that was believed to have been located in central Turkey. It is said that he went there with his army and as soon as he was seen, the parties settled their differences rather than face his wrath.

All was not war with Sargon. He furthered trade and trade flourished. He traded with everyone he could and this included the rich Indus Valley, the areas around the Persian Gulf, Cappadocia, Greece, Crete and many other areas. He was importing such riches as silver, Cedar from Lebanon and even lapis lazuli.

Before Sargon was through, he had conquered all of southern Mesopotamia, parts of Syria, Anatolia and Elam, which is known today as western Iran. Because of the fact that records are missing, we may never know exactly when Sargon ruled or when the different events of his rule were accomplished, or even what order they were executed in. This may all change if we find some of the lost cities. We know that some records were kept, so there are probably more, located in a vault in some long buried lost city. Some say that Sargon reigned over his kingdom for 56 years. He hadn't developed a competent administration to administer over his conquests and because of this, the second part of his rule was rife with rebellion. His empire was vast by the standards of the time and without the proper administrators, it couldn't be controlled. Sargon had been a great military organizer but a poor civilian one.

Sargon was the Napoleon of his time. Some loved him, many feared him and others wanted to breakaway from him. Because of him, Akkadian script had been adopted to the Sumerian language. He was one of the first of the real greats and may have inspired those that came after him for thousands of years.

I think that we can all see the difference here between Rome and Mesopotamia under Sargon. When the Romans conquered a people that were given a chance to become part of the empire and if they accepted, administrators were sent out and that country was run in the same manner as the Roman homeland. Sagron gave much more thought to conquest than administration and as I said above, this is what finally caused him so much trouble in the end. It will be interesting if we ever find more records, there are so many unanswered questions.