Sargon I the Ancient

(also Sargon of Akkad; in Akkadian, Sharru-Ken, Sharrum-Kin), the founder, in the 24th century B.C., of a kingdom in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, with its capital in Akkad. Sargon I was of Semitic origin, from the city of Kish; according to legend, he was of humble birth. He defeated the Sumerian king Lugal-zaggesi and conquered all the city-states of Mesopotamia. His armies ranged as far as Elam, Syria, and Asia Minor.

Under Sargon I, the holdings and economic activities of the temples were brought under royal authority. The state of Sargon I represented the first attempt to create a centralized despotic state, in which a low-born royal bureaucracy displaced the old tribal aristocracy and in which the organs of self-government of the earlier independent city-states—the council and the popular assembly—were turned into minor administrative bodies.