What's /his' opinion of him, was he a good man or is he just a complete legend

This has always bothered me too. Seems pretty fucking obnoxious.

sarcuck of cuckadd

I couldn't take him seriously after he replied to a video without even watching the entire thing. He's a bit thick to be honest, but his current crusade against ancaps is fucking golden.

It's less cringey because many retards don't know who Sargon of Akkad was, so they see it as his original name. If he literally named himself "Alexander the Great" people would laugh at him and he wouldn't make it past 10k subs. That being said he is on is way to calling himself Socrates.

>be fat
>thinks his opinion matters

Sup homies, guy who actually studied sumerian and sumerology here, tripping for this thread.

Ask me whatever.

Anyway, fuck that fat cunt for ruining the name of a pretty amazing autocrat. Although his empire was too military based, and the racial hegenomy of Akkadians was probably it's downfall.

to what extent do you think old testament style conceptions of laws and 'justice' were based on the work of sargo and his buds?

Oldest law code is the Code of Ur-Nammu, which is a little later - UrIII. Is far, far more civilised than later babylonian pieces - instituted a lot of fines for different offences, as opposed to 'eye for an eye,' probably because UrIII was so logistically advanced - Babylonians didn't have such an effective administration. I'm tempted to hypothesise that Sargon had something similar, but his empire was militaristic and less coherant - the precendents are more lilely to be found in the local law codes of the old Sumerian city-states, which haven't survived. Having said this, we know they had judges and administrative offices as far back as EDII, so Sargon could likely build on that.

So tl;dr somewhat, but the Babylonian influence was far more significant, and I think you shouldn't neglect pre-existing tribal laws.

Ah sorry, justice. Well, the mesopotamian view of the actions of a ruler was god on earth - but the older idea was the personification of the god's justice. Initially the various city gods, then later Enlil and An - the state highest gods. So justice was the responsibility of the king, via his bureaucracy.

There are also tantilising glimpses of something approaching the chinese concept of the mandate of heaven in the laments - the kingdom falls due to the actions/injustice of a ruler, but this is coupled with an awareness of these things as inevitable due to the workings of fate/the gods.

Was Gilgamesh a real person? Did he leave a legacy in Uruk?

Ah shit that's interesting, I think the concept that 'bad shit happens because of poor actions by decision making elites' is something that precedes the modern state by (to put it mildly) a fair bit. How did they manage to keep such a bureaucracy going? I'm imagining the logistics of writing, copying and distributing clay tablets over swathes of land took up a hefty amount of resources and time.
(Also one more retarded question, what were the populations of the cities in those empires like roughly? where they urban centres like today, with most people inside as opposed to in the countryside or was it still primarily in the surrounding villages like most pre-modern cities?)
This is really interesting, thanks for your replies!

I believe we actually have one seal which does actually say 'Bis-Gil-Ga-Mesh' on it, which is almost cetainly him, from something like ate EDII/early EDIII. He's rooted in the wider social dynamic of EDIII, where the lugal king (essentially the roman Imperator) begins to usurp the offices of the more priestly En king, across all the various city states. Intrigingly, Gilgamesh is depicted in the legend as not the man who raises the walls of Uruk, but this is the work of the Seven Sages - almost certainly an advisory body of buereaucrats, at a time when kingship was far less absolute. He's likely an early example of a deified king, at root, and the legend is then expanded on during the Sargonid and UrIII era as a cultural zeitgeist - an acquating of a man to the status of a god as a precedent for the later divine status of kings.

Having said this, he's very, very early - before writing had really matured. Uruk we know was 5.5km2 by around 2200 BC (same size as Rome under trajan) so he may have been one of those kings responsible for it's rise. In Algave's Uruk World System, you can see a decent model of how they got to such a height - control of trade routes, not formal imperium.

Ur II has been described as 'one of the worst totalitarian regimes in history' because they were so, so efficient. We know shit like 'Ane has a 3 year old goat called Shehas. He has x amount of firewood, he has y amount of land, he owes this in taxation.'

Essentially, it has precedents in the highly effective administrations before it, but it's taken to the nth degree. As early as 3500BC Uruk was taking all food to the temple and distributing it in standardised, disposable ration bowls - and this is before fucking writing. Writing began by tax/food records, eg 'fish-sign, 200' and was like this long, long before it became true written language.

But further - mespotamia made advanced administraton inevitble, like china, because of the need for irrigation - you need to organise a lot of manpower to maintain and create that to the common benefit. It also has fuck all minerals, necessitating trade. We have Sargon having a specific class of agents that go out on trading missions for the state, and it absolutely was around there earlier. Everything else preceded from this.

TBC

This guy is so bad at debates it's incredible.

He was always whining about SJWs using "muh feelings" arguments yet he's doing the exact same thing when arguing with someone.

At one point in his latest debate he proceeds to show a picture of a starving African child and use it as an argument.

He's pretty much "if the feminists do it's bad, but when I do it it's ok because I'm right"

In one of my studies, I actually noticed something in UrIII which I'm working into a hypothesis - the amount of fucking grain they took from cities was ridiculous. Ostensibly for state-wide distribution. But I think they were actively trying to cripple the ability of cities to hold out, if they rebelled. Same reason they began to circulate statues of the gods to other cities, to have them 'visit their relatives.' They knew Sargon had left the cities too autonomous and, while the rebellion occuring under Shulgi had failed, it still was a massive, massive problem.

Logistically, fuckloads of people, fuckloads of accounting (down to marking 'x scribe wrote y at z hour' on tablets), a literate class like china that presumably had examinations, and highly centralised administration.

Population - unknown, but high as fuck. Uruk, like I said, was 5.5km2. That's Imperial rome under trajan. Unfortunately, we tend to only excavate the tells, which are where all the shiny tablets are, so we don't know that much about ordinary people.

TBC

The countryside, however, is interesting. It's spoken of almost as a foreign country - there was already a distinction between 'city-dwellers' and 'country people' in EDIII. The formal power cities actually had wasn;t like a true empire, until Sargon/Uriii - cities had spheres of influence shading out into the countryside. Hence why we get reports of people called Guti and Martu already in the countryside before they manifest as a huge problem and destrroy the state - likely they were nomads/tribes which settled and were used as agricultural workers, before rising up in a giagantic 'fuck-you' and ruinging everything. The Gothic comparison is tempting, but too simple, I suspect.

Also no worries senpai, my field is far, far too understudied.

>This guy is so bad at debates it's incredible.

Well his channel is literally dedicated to taking 20 minute videos of someone he disagrees with and dissecting each individual sentence to scrutinize when the opponent cannot respond or offer counter-arguments. He probably spends hours upon hours forming his responses.

Can we leave off discussions of autists and focus on men with sheepskin kilts?

>Dissecting
I dont think that's what you call misunderstanding basic academic literature and extrapolating upon possible further arguments they MIGHT make.

That picture is of a known fake artifact. FYI

STOP TALKING ABOUT YOUTUBE JESUS THAT IS NOT WHAT THIS THREAD IS

Ha, really? I just googled sumerian kilt.

His recitations channel his good.

On his main channel he is a try hard who focuses on low hanging fruit.

>fallacy
>fallacy
>fallacy

holy shit, my field of (bare) expertise is international relations and I'm taking from your words that although there were hints of a 'modern' bureaucratic(ish) state the cities still had regional autonomy/ acted like nodes for the surrounding area ala most city states?
Also (agains sorry for possibly stupid question) how could they know about Ane's goats and not know the rough population? was it simply an issue of city records being well kept and the countryside not so much? Either way interesting as fuck. And how far were the whole "priest class distributing food and being main elites" to do with religious piety or was it a simple evolution of "dude with the food tells you not to be rude" like in early japan and C.America?

What do you know of Utnapishtim and the connection between his story and Noah?

Fascinating stuff, man.

Is it known how land ownership worked in these Mesopotamian empires? You said the rulers of empires had a divine mandate or were gods themselves in their societies, so was there a concept of them personally owning the cities? It sounds like there wouldn't have been private property the way we think of it.

Okay some basic questions.

What would a Sumerian city look like? Would it have walls around it with guards? When I think of a historical city I usually think of a citizen/guards/leader hierarchy structure. How did the Sumerians maintain law and order and how did the leader exact his rule?

What's your favorite fact or deed from the historical Sargon of Akkad, and what is your favorite myth about him?

I know he's a powerful figure and one of the first of the legendary kings of human history, but unfortunately I don't know that much else about him.

There's more than that. Jacobsen theorises that there was democracy in the preliterate period - specifically, both offices of kingship are innately temporary, grammatically - ie. not life long. From various sources in myth, he theorises that they were initally temporary positions created in response to crisis, or to oversee public works, that later became permanent. Originally, the whole region was city states like greece, and there's some indication that representatives from each one gathered at Eridu to enact pan-sumerian legislation. There's a EDII reference to 'Men at arms in foreign lands, sumerians' which seems to be a pan-city force, perhaps like the greek alliances.

Well, we have tax records, but no censuses (censi?) - perhaps they didn't exist, perhaps we haven't found them. Ur III did keep exhaustive centralised records, but I suspect that knowing the exact population wasn't a concern.

Priests-kings (En/Ensi) were the predominant rulers until you get lugals usurping their offices, and combining the military and religious - there are some indications of tensions between palace and temple in Lagash, Uruk, Ur and Umma. Preisthood as a whole gradually centralises from having each 'city-god' as predominant in the local pantheon, to the evolution of a pan-sumerian pantheon of interrelated dynasties (exactly like greece) under UrIII/sargon. The fact that UrIII in particular had such a massive influence on religion, down to writing down all the epics for the first time, suggests it was a huge preoccupation and, therefore, a major part of the administration. Sargon also installed his family members as priests, like the famous EnHeduanna, and she in this position was able to overcome the administration of the local king.

Ha, two things.
1. Absolutely precedent for Noah. Remember, the hebrew calender still has the month of Dumuzi (a sumerian god) and Abraham came from Ur.
2. The guy who found it was so astonished he took off all his clothes and paced around in some sort of panic attack. Victorians, everyone.

He's not that bad, but he tries so hard to sound intellectual. Usually when streaming with someone he randomly says how he's reading Plato or Hobbes and how current political events are similar to historical ones. It was pretty cringey when he made a video comparing Trump to Gracchus.

For example when he can't find good arguments for his opinions he'll usually say "well I read x number of books backing my opinion how many did you read?"

1. Yes - surprising amounts of free-men and partly free-men to slaves, but they get increasingly crushed by UrIII. Think chinese peasantry. Almost certainly a similar system of village elders, and collective punishments. I think the best model of the farmer/temple/palace relationship is probably food offerings - you didn't really own your produce as it was there due to the god, so a portion went to the temple/palace. It almost certainly developed from food offering rites.

2. Soooomewhat. They generally became truly divine later - before Sargon/UrIII they were the servants of the gods, whose city it was (see Lugalbanda and the Thunderbird as a myth example of this) and cringed before them appropriately, then later took on more divine aspects. Shulgi is the first, and he only adds the divine digir to his name after he crushes a gigantic revolt of sumerian cities, probably seeking divine authority. Having said this, Eanatum of Lagash is atypically described as being 'moulded in his mother's womb' by Ningirsu, and being the child of the same, so there was definitely an earlier substrata of this.

Mound, due to massive amount of ruins underneath, like Ankh-Morpork is anyone reads Pratchett (you all know you fucking do). Walls after EDII - interestingly, there's a military explosion in EDIII which suddenly leads to huge walls - likely due to lugal conflicts/climatic change. Formal army.

Judges, courts, probably something akin to polcie/officers of said courts, possibly right of appeal to the king himself for certain cases. In villages, councils of elders and later a local representative - but that's all likely, but far from certain.

Don;t know, really. We actually don;t have a huge amount from his reign - he's similar to your standard founder in that it was all fucking chaotic and he established himself after great effort, late. Pity he destroyed Umma.

Oh, but I do like that he made his own capital at Agade/Akkad. Wish we could definitively excavate it. That was completely a new idea.

Couldn't they have been two separate accounts of the same event, not one lifting the idea from the other?

Where can I learn more about his great conquests?

Oh hey, thread's still alive. Ok.

Nope. Sumerian is way, way earlier than any other, and the narrative is too similar. I'd agree with you as a lot of civilisations have flood motifs, but this is specifically about a god saying 'Hey dude, get your family on a boats, shit is about to go down' and making a rainbow afterwards as a sign of peace.

Wish I knew. We actually have surprisingly little beyond year names of four of his campaigns. Sumerians/Akkadians, generally didn't give blow by blow accounts.

>Utnapishtim
Oh also birds, mountain, etc.

>the hebrew calender still has the month of Dumuzi (a sumerian god)
holy shit I didn't know that. there's something mind boggling to me about how widespread Sumerian influence was even thousands of years later. As far as I can tell none of the cities south of Babylon were of much importance after Ur III. I have somewhat limited knowledge that during the Uruk period there was wide reaching cultural influence from Uruk and groups of colonists set up in an attempt to control trade routes. Did this continue into the period before Sargon or was wider regional power more decentralized with groups like the Elamites growing in power? sorry if I'm being unclear.

Why did you choose sumerology? Even on a history forum, no one really seems to care or have interest in Mesopotamia..

That's...actually really quite spooky. I was doing some (very) basic research into the origins of federalisation and apart from the basic ones of "look at persia and a few N.American tribes" Akkad/Sumer never really popped up. Then again I suppose it's quite problematic to associate pre-modern polities with modern (1700+) institutions. One final question before I get back to work, would you say that Sumerian style 'welfare' (oh how I hate to use those terms in a historical context) would be more representative of Marx's ideas of pre-modern socialism(gathered and given for good of politie) or was it more panem et circenses?
Also whats the EDII/EDIII stuff refer to?
Sorry for the banality of these, but it's so fucking rare for someone on this shitwhole to actually have an idea of what they're talking about. Whenever something comes up regarding statecraft and governments most of the replies make me want to stick my dick in a woodchipper.
I can't imagine how frustrating it must be for someone who's actually read in depth.

Hell, learning about the origin of literally everything western. Also, I have to admit, a certain amount of special snowflake 'my discipline is more obscure than yours' in my uni years.

Yes and no. There were essentially a lot of small kingdoms of cities with interrelated royal dynasties - Ur was Ur, Umma and Girsu, and others gradually expanded their power bases until you essentially had a series of 'leagues.'

Uruk is always later held in reference - Sargon installed his daughter as the high priestess there, and I believe it was always significant, albiet not to the extent that it was earlier.

Very difficult. Probably more akin to a religious obligation being translated into a social necessity - so you could maybe make a leap from gladiators at funerals -> games to fit panem et circum, but it's a big one. Then again, it's difficult to say that it started as religious, as if there was a 'democracy' of sorts, then inevitably it becomes something like the greek city states, in that it is genuinely an organised system of social rationing.

Ah, sorry - Early-Dynastic 2 and 3. City states.

Yeah, it's so fucking niche. God I hate classicists/'greeks invented x/y/z memes.

Should expand - you're absolutely right about Uruk (Read Algaze's Uruk World System) but it also extended to fortresses/garrison towns imposing tariffs on waterways/trade routes.

Almost certainly this continued, but we don;t know a great deal about the contryside due to excavations understandably focusing on cities. Likely that it did - there must have been an official presence to administer agriculture, also. Sargon/UrIII move this from city officials to appointed government positions, as part of a general trend away from city autonomy.

I should also say that I would characterise UrIII as totalitarian and Sargon as autarky with the federalist elements being purged by UrIII, if I was being a anachronistic dick.

ah, so Sargon was the fucker who centralised everything? I was wondering how it went from semi-autonomous city-states to empire.
another quick question (last one I promise) how did they fund/maintain armed forces, garrisons or 'police' offices?
And thanks so much for answering questions, you're a star.

Also did you mean autocracy there? or was it entirely self dependant due to there not being that many other big polities around?

Did you find work in your field then?

Eh, no worries.

He did and he didn't. The city states were moving in that direction anyway through coalescing into larger political units, so someone like Sargon was inevitable.

Dunno. They almost certainly had wages, and there's maybe a precedent in EDII for Lugals having personal retainers before they become total kings, so it could well have been some sort of feudalisitc thing initially. But a look at UrIII's sheer bureaucracy would make me lean towards wages perhaps being distributed from captains. Pay would have been in kind, like in egypt - they did have a system similar to deben with 'prices' but the physical medium was still bartering.

Thinking about it, possibly both. Autocracy suggests a single powerful individual, which is certainly the case with the kings of UrIII - but I think autakry may fit, as the ideal behind UrIII was a complete union of all the city states into a single empire, with no possibility for revolution. Equally, the role of the king was absolute, but there was a strong system of governors/military commanders comparable to the late roman/byzantine theme system - the dominance of military power over civil at the limes.

Necessarily Ur III needed trade, so it couldn't ever be entirely self-sufficient, but the strong organisation of the grain supply/taxation in kind suggests a desire to have the government as pre-eminent, and it's debatable as to how much foreign trade would have impacted the lives of the general people.

Heh, trying to. Have been teaching for a while, but plan to return to it with more shekels.

I really like the contrast on Veeky Forums between utter fuck wits and people who legit know what they are talking about.

Any reading/listening recommendations for an intro to Near East history in this period?

It is fun, isn't it?

These are from my dissertation.

Algaze, G. 1993. The Uruk World System. Chicago.
Cooper, J. 1983b. Reconstructing History from Ancient Sources: The Lagash-Umma Border Conflict. Malibu.
Dahl, J. 2007. The Ruling Family of Ur III Umma: A prosopographical Analysis of an Elite Family in Southern Iraq 4000 Years Ago. Leiden.
Foster, B. 1982. Administration and Use of Institutional Land in Sargonic Sumer. Copenhagen.
Goedicke, H & Roberts, J. (eds) 1975. Unity and Diversity: Essays in the History, Literature and Religion of the Ancient Near East. Baltimore.
Jacobsen, T. 1970. Towards the Image of Tammuz and Other Essays on Mesopotamian History and Culture. Cambridge.
Jacobsen, T. 1987. The Harps that Once-: Sumerian Poetry in Translation. London.
Leick, G. 2002. Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City. London.
Matthews, R. 1993. Cities, Seals and Writing: Archaic Seal Inscriptions from Jemdat Nasr and Ur. Berlin.
Michalowski, P. 1989. The Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur. Winona Lake.
Poo, M. 2005. Enemies of Civilisation: Attitudes towards foreigners in Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and China. Albany.
Van De Mieroop, M. 1997. The Ancient Mesopotamian City, Oxford.
Van De Mieroop, M. 1999. Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of History. Padstow.
Weiss, H. (ed) 1986. The Origins of Cities in Dry-farming Syria and Mesopotamia in the Third Millenium B.C. Guilford.
Westenholz, J. 1997. Legends of the Kings of Akkade. Winona Lake.

Also Poo was always amusing to quote.

Which would you recommend most?

Dare I say, which one leans most towards pop-history? Know basically zilch about this area pre-Persian. Don't normally mind dry academic tomes, but they can be a slog when I am utterly lacking context.

The more he expresses his opinion, the more it's revealing his edgy political bait and incel objectivist social attitude. This guy is the quiet but obtuse one at a gathering who wafts of superiority and delusions of grandeur.

The epic of Gilgamesh is pretty good, though.

Hmm. I'm horrendously academic in my reading. Jacobsen because he was a genius, but start with Leick and Mieroop's The Ancient Mesopotamian City. Poo is the best if you're looking for a comparative piece - changed my entire outlook (also quite short). Algave is the foremost authority for the really early stuff.

Jacobsen famously got thrown out of a talk he was giving in Chicago because someone thought he was a tramp who had snuck in. Dude did not give a fuck.

Allrighty. Thanks for the recommendations.

Ok. Sorry if they're too academic - it's a narrow field.

What was your dissertation on?

Ah it'll be okay. I'm not a stranger to academic, it's just I normally have a passing familiarity with the subject.

Shame it's narrow really. It's always seemed incredibly interesting whenever I have seen it referenced.

Totally blew my mind when I found out that there was basically a Museum of Antiquities in the Achaemenid Empire, or fucking Xenophon camped out in Assyrian (or possibly Akkadian I can't remember) ruins and marvelling at them.

Sumerian cultural consciousness and it's development. I did rather well.

Huh, source on the 'museum?'

Ah my mistake, completely mis-remembered where that came from. (got the right book, but it was just Pre-Persian in Babylon)

books.google.co.uk/books?id=0tVAE7bE_2sC&printsec=frontcover&dq=persian fire&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjJheeh4-_QAhVGB8AKHYBFAvUQ6AEIIzAA#v=onepage&q=antiquities&f=false

Why are you guys talking about the actual historical figure? I thought this thread was about that brilliant political commentator Carl Benjamin also know as "Sargon of Akkad".

Think of it like a reverse Veeky Forums thread, it started badly then got less and less inane.

I'd really like to get a history degree, but I can't justify the long school and very low job prospects.

Thanks.

Fuck that autist. My first reaction when I heard about him was 'shit did I make some sort of cringy account when I was 18 that got discovered?'

Mmm. It can be quite versatile, though. There's too much memeing against it - you can do stuff with english related stuff very easily, as it's mainly essay writing. Very beneficial for analysis based professions, and compartmentalisation of info.

I'm glad I was interesting. I very occassionally trip for mesopotamian stuff as I'm the only guy I've ever seen on here with a grasp of it.

>make a thread third to see if /his knew he was someone else, third to see if people knew it was probably his grandson, third to have sincere discussion on this ancient world
Well done /his once the melanin warrior left you have started being good again

[spoiler] but seriously fuck Carl for ruining the English accent, and going 'you don't know what it's like until you go through it' to someone saying the poor should work harder and not raise the minimum wage

See
Also don't forget he's a quadroon, smoker and actual cuck

Essay skills help everywhere. Really it's the 40 year old part time degree once you have a wife, kids and stable income

>smoker
What an odd thing to mention.

It is in modern society
>oh I'm going to do drugs and then make the taxpayer pay for my bad life decisions
And no it is not a tax profit

I don't know man, I'm Eastern European and we used to beat up kids who didn't smoke in high school.

>and actual cuck
source?

He raises his wife's son, not even joking.

I'm still waiting for a source. And he describes him as his son, not his wife's son.

It's a YouTube comment on some vid. I'll check my folders now for (You)

Yeah that's what I thought.