Collapse of the Akkadian Empire
The Akkadian Empire collapsed around 2154 BC, about 140 years after Sargon founded the first empire in history. Its later kings had held together a territory running from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean by garrisoning the Sumerian cities, appointing Akkadian governors, and taxing a countryside that had been organised for local temple economies. Naram-Sin, Sargon's grandson, took the empire to its greatest extent and did something no Mesopotamian king had done: he wrote his name with the divine determinative and called himself god of Akkad and king of the four quarters. The Curse of Agade, a Sumerian poem composed a century or two later, explains what followed as punishment. It has Naram-Sin sack the temple of Enlil at Nippur, and the god answer by loosing the Gutians — a people from the Zagros described as not classed among people, with human faces and dogs' intelligence — on the land. The poem is theology rather than reporting, and the Gutian invasions were real. The physical evidence points elsewhere. Excavation at Tell Leilan in northern Syria found the site abandoned around 2200 BC under a layer of wind-blown sand, and marine cores from the Gulf of Oman show a sharp increase in dust at the same date. A drought lasting perhaps three centuries — the 4.2-kiloyear event — appears to have emptied the rain-fed northern plains and driven their populations south into the irrigated south, which could not feed them. Ur reunified Mesopotamia around 2112 BC. Whether the drought caused the collapse or merely accompanied it is still argued, and it is the first case for which the question can be asked with physical evidence.
- Year: 2154 BCE
- Category: Political
