The Legendary Kings Of Sumer And Akkad

Heroes Who Ruled Thousands Of Years, As Appointed By The Gods

Oct 24, 2009

Recorded in a document known as the Sumerian King List, the Sumerians had a detailed knowledge of the connection between divine rule and the rule of kings.

The Sumerian King List is a compilation of Sumerian tablets published by Theodore Jacobsen in 1939. The documents were likely recorded around 1900 B.C.E. in the city of Isin, which was then the dominant power in Sumer and Akkad. The list was known in ancient times as ‘When kingship was first lowered from heaven,’ so named after the opening line, which was the traditional Sumerian way of naming such documents.

The Fantastic Reigns Of The First Kings

Although there are theories of how the first kings of Ancient Sumer and Akkad where first chosen by councils of elders there is no direct evidence to support this. In fact according to the Sumerian literature the rule of kings can be traced back to a time of demigod kings and further back to the time when the world was ruled directly by the gods themselves. Whether this is evidence of ancient propaganda or representative of something else is unknown.

The opening line of the Sumerian King List shows this transition of the right to rule from the gods onto the first kings of Iraq. According to the King List, kingship was first lowered to the city of Eridu in the extreme south of Iraq where two kings are said to have ruled 64,800 years. Then kingship passed to Bad-tibira where three kings ruled for 108,000 years. One of these kings is identified as the shepherd and vegetation god Dumuzi, who is labeled in the King List as a ‘fishermen.’ The city of Larak then has one king on the King List who rules for 28,800 years, followed by one king from Sippar who rules for 21,000 years and one king from Shurappak who rules for 18,600 years.

The Flood Swept Over All

After the mention of King Ubar-Tutu of Shurappak is a sentence which has caused much speculation among scholars; ‘the Flood swept over all.’ Although there have been numerous attempts to equate this mention of a flood with the “Biblical Flood” there can as yet be no definite conclusions. While ancient Sumer and Akkad where regularly subjected to flooding there has to date been no archaeological finding to indicate that a flood ever devastated the entire area. Instead it is likely that the origin of the enigmatic sentence was a series of localized disasters, such as plague, famine and warfare, coupled with a flood near Shurrapak, which held hegemony at the time and thereby imprinted the memory of its tragedy on the regional memory.

It is possible to place this flood event near 2900 B.C.E. and following this in the King List the record begins to change, reflecting a break from the purely mythological aspects and extraordinary reigns ascribed to the antediluvian kings. The lengthy reigns of the early kings can be seen as representative of the scribe’s appreciation for the distance of time which removed the Dynasty in Isin from the many kings who ruled long ago. It can also be seen as symbolic of the power and divinity of those ancient kings whose hegemony Isin was now claiming. As the scribe was likely in the employ of the current monarch there would be little point in recording kingship as being transitory and in fact quite the opposite message would need to be conveyed.

After the flood, the King List records that kingship descended on Kish which was located north in Akkad. The first Dynasty of Kish is recorded as having twenty three kings who ruled for a total of 17,980. The longest reigning of these is Etana who is said to have ruled for 1500 years.

The legend of Etana; the shepherd, who ascended to heaven and conquered all the foreign countries," is found throughout Babylonian myth and was a popular narrative. The story of King Etana, which begins as a fable, and ends with a quest to heaven in search of a fertility drug, can be seen as a sign that by around 2,800 B.C.E. the power of kingship had become a hereditary title passed down to a male heir.

The King List records the reign of Mebaragesi as the twenty second King of Kish. Mebaragesi is given the title “En” meaning lord or priest, and is the first of Iraq’s ancient king’s whose existence can be verified outside of the King List with a contemporary archaeological find. In 1959 a fragment of an alabaster vase stored in the Iraq Museum was found to contain this king’s name and scholars were then able to safely work from the premise that the King List was based on real people who governed real cities.

The First dynasty of Kish is believed to have held the kingship until around 2,700 B.C.E. when Meberagesi’s son Agga became king. The King List records next the ascendancy of Uruk under the leadership of Gilgamesh. After a siege, Gilgamesh, arguably the greatest of Sumerian heroes, forced Kish to submit to his rule.

The Dynasty of Uruk is listed as having seven kings who rule for a realistic 140 years. It is known that Gilgamesh was the fifth king of the Dynasty of Uruk and therefore his predecessors must have ruled as contemporaries of the Dynasty of Kish. This increased accuracy of the chronology, as well as the availability of other inscriptions that verify the reigns of the monarchs has helped to define this period as the beginning of history for ancient Iraq.

Roaf, Michael, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia, (Andromeda, Oxfordshire, 2004.)

The copyright of the article The Legendary Kings Of Sumer And Akkad in Near Eastern History is owned by Robert McRoberts. Permission to republish The Legendary Kings Of Sumer And Akkad in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.