The World's First Conqueror: Sargon of Akkad and the Birth of Empire (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798190491234)

A basket on a river. A gardener's household. A cupbearer pouring another man's wine.

Nothing about Sargon's origins suggested he would become anything. No noble blood. No inherited claim. Just a name he gave himself: the king is legitimate - a title chosen by a man who fully expected to have his right to rule questioned, and meant to answer before anyone could ask.

He answered by conquering everything. Every walled city-state in Sumer fell to him, one by one, in a war of unprecedented scale. Then he kept going - west to the Mediterranean, east into the mountains of Iran - building something the ancient world had never seen: not just a conquest, but an empire built to last, run by governors and scribes rather than by the sword alone. He installed his own daughter as high priestess at Ur, and she became history's first named author, her poetry still read four thousand years later.

He also, in his final years, watched city after conquered city rise against him - and crushed every rebellion, right up until the day he died undefeated.

His empire outlived him by a century. Then it collapsed so completely that later scribes could only call it a curse, and his capital city vanished so thoroughly that it has never been found - not by armies, not by archaeologists, not by anyone in four thousand years since.

This is the story of the first man to build an empire - and the first to prove how completely one can be lost.