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Summary
Date: 800 B.C.E.
The Sargon Geography is a Mesopotamian text from the first millennium BCE that survives in two known copies: a Neo-Assyrian tablet and a Late Babylonian tablet. Though attributed to the legendary third-millennium ruler Sargon of Akkad, the composition is much later and reflects the ideological concerns of the first millennium, likely during the Neo-Assyrian period (800–700 BCE). The text presents Sargon as a universal monarch whose empire spans “the totality of the land under heaven” and “the lands from sunrise to sunset,” encompassing the entire known world. This rhetorical expansion of Sargon’s domain served to project imperial ideals onto a mythologized past.
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