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The first large empire of the history was created with its centre in Mesopotamia, the cradle of the whole Mediterranean civilization, together with Egypt, between the XXIV and the XXIII century B.C. by the Akkadian king Sargon I, also known as Sargon the Great, who reigned between 2334 and 2279 B.C. (according to a Sumerian kings list).

His capital was the town of Akkad (or Agade), of which we know the position only with approximation; most likely, it was placed on the left bank of the Euphrates, in the modern Iraq, between the towns of Kish and Sippar. The expansion of his reign founded the first Semite dynasty able to unify under his dominion the whole Mesopotamia from the Persian Gulf until the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the eastern part of Anatolia and part of Persia.

This conquest had the task of create a vast territory for to ease commerce and make safe its main routes across the region. Commerce, in fact, was the main economic activity of Mesopotamian populations, besides agriculture and already very important for the Sumerians, who had dominated the present Iraq until the previous centuries.

We don't know how Sargon I took the power, given that many are the legends on him and rather scarce the texts telling facts about his reign. A late Assyrian text of the VII century B.C. considers him as an Assyrian king, one of the early founder of their reign and gives information about his birth and childhood; he was the son of a high priestess and pf an unknown father. His mother, had to deliver him secretly because of her role and abandon him in a basket, sealed with bitumen, to the current of the Euphrates River. Its waters carried him until he was saved by Akki, a water drawer who adopted as his son and later made him work as his gardener. In some way, Sargon reached in becoming king. This story should have inspired, at least 1000 years later that Biblical tale of Moses, who was abandoned along the Nile in a similar manner after his birth.

In any case, the first conquests he made in his expansion were southward, against the Sumerian towns of Uruk (the first to fall) and then Ur, Lagash and Umma, electing Akkadian governors to rule them. This started the definitive end of the Sumerians as independent reign and as a people, because soon assimilated or mixed with the culture of the Akkadians who were Semites.

Later, he defeated the 4 kings of Elam, in western Persia and moved westward, conquering Yarmuti, Ebla and Mari in Syria and the Taurus mountains in Anatolia.

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