Ancient Mesopotamia

Despite the best efforts of modern scholars and archaeologists over the past century, the ancient Mesopotamian capital of the Akkadian empire remains unlocated in today's Iraq.

Better known as Akkad but also referenced as Agade, this city formed the capital of the Akkadian empire in the second half of the third millennium BC.

Early Agade

Although the Sumerian king list (see 'related links') claims that Sargon built Agade, the city is mentioned in the reigns of more than one of his immediate predecessors. These include En-cakanca-ana of Uruk of the 'Second Dynasty', and Lugalzaggesi of the same city's 'Third Dynasty'. Sargon is more likely to have re-built or expanded an existing city which lay on the northern periphery of Sumerian civilisation.

It does seem to have been a relatively new and minor arrival on the scene however, likely being built up quite swiftly from an earlier village (the same sudden advance took place in Babylon in the 1800s -1700s BC).

There exists a subtle distinction in the available literature between 'Agade'/'Akkad' (the city, translated as 'Akkade' in Sumerian and 'Akkadû' in Akkadian) and the Akkadian empire or the land of Akkad.

Some ancient texts use 'Akkad' in a broader regional sense, particularly in later periods ('Sumer and Akkad' to combine two lands into one region or possession). This occasionally can complicate arguments about the city's location. Modern scholars are generally careful to distinguish the city from the region, and adopting that air of precision tends to strengthen any discussion of the evidence.

Some of the earliest cities, such as Sippar, Borsippa, and Kish in the north, and Ur, Uruk, and Eridu in the south, formed the endpoints of what became the complex Sumerian network of cities and canals (click or tap on map to view full sized)

Sargon clearly expanded the city, and made it the heart of his new empire. To date though, even though his empire dominated Mesopotamia for more than a century and transformed the political landscape of the ancient Near East, the city itself has never been conclusively identified.

More than a hundred and forty years of archaeological investigation has produced numerous theories, but no excavated site has yielded decisive evidence which would be required to confirm Agade's location. Modern scholarship therefore relies upon a combination of archaeological survey, cuneiform texts, historical geography, and geomorphology when it comes to attempting to narrow down the search.

Texts and inscriptions

Royal inscriptions repeatedly describe Agade as the political and religious heart of the state. Later literary compositions which include the Curse of Agade portray it as a magnificent city whose downfall followed divine displeasure. Although these literary texts cannot be treated as straightforward historical accounts, they do preserve valuable geographical traditions alongside ideological themes.

The greatest obstacle to pinpointing the city's location is the fact that no inscription has yet been discovered in situ which unequivocally states that an excavated mound is Agade.

Archaeologists therefore have had to indirectly reconstruct its position. Ancient itineraries, administrative tablets, and royal inscriptions consistently indicate that Agade lay in central Mesopotamia, somewhere to the north of Babylon and to the south-east of Sippar, within the region which was bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates river systems.

Sargon 'the Great', the warrior king of apparently humble origins, unified Sumer for (perhaps) the first time in recorded history through a series of campaigns and the defeat of the current holder of Sumer's equivalent of a high kingship

Several texts also imply close communication with the city state of Eshnunna and the heavily-populated Diyala valley, suggesting a strategically important position which could control routes between southern Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau. These converging textual clues have long persuaded most Assyriologists that the city stood in the vicinity of modern Baghdad rather than farther north or south.

Avoiding certainty

While there certainly exists a broad tendency to favour a location in the central alluvium between Sippar, the Diyala, and the Tigris, many specialists have deliberately avoided further narrowing it down because the evidence remains equivocal.

For that reason a statement of the city standing 'in the vicinity of modern Baghdad rather than farther north or south' should really be softened to something closer to 'within the central alluvium of Iraq, broadly within the region of modern Baghdad'.

Nineteenth-century scholars initially attempted to identify Agade with known archaeological mounds. One influential proposal equated it with Tell ed-Der, ancient Sippar-Anunitum. This theory gradually fell from favour as cuneiform evidence demonstrated that Sippar-Anunitum and Agade were distinct cities.

Other suggestions placed the capital at Sippar itself, at Opis, or at sites along the lower Diyala, but each encountered contradictions in the textual evidence or the archaeological record. Recent reviews have concluded that none of the traditional identifications satisfactorily explains all available evidence.

The ancient city of Shaduppum - the modern archaeological site of Tell Harmal - now lies in the Baghdad governorate of Iraq, and within the borders of modern Baghdad itself

Modern searches

The modern search has become increasingly interdisciplinary. Rather than attempting to match Agade with a single conspicuous tell (archaeological mound), researchers tend to examine the changing courses of the Tigris and Euphrates. During the third millennium BC both rivers followed channels which significantly differed from their modern courses.

Extensive sedimentation, avulsion, and later urban development have buried or obscured many ancient settlements. Some scholars have therefore argued that Agade may lie beneath deep alluvial deposits, making ineffective any conventional archaeological survey. Others have suggested that its remains may survive beneath modern Baghdad or its expanding suburbs, where excavation is either impossible or is severely restricted. More than one ancient city site is already surrounded by modern Baghdad's extensive suburbs (see Shaduppum and Uzarlulu).

It was Christophe Wall-Romana who argued against seeking a precise, isolated tell and instead defined a geographical zone within which Agade most probably lay. Drawing upon administrative texts, military itineraries, and travel times between known cities, he concluded that the capital should be sought within the central Tigris-Diyala corridor rather than at previously proposed outlying sites. Although this analysis did not identify the city itself, it significantly narrowed down any area which could be deserving of systematic investigation.

Recent scholarship has largely reinforced this cautious approach. Naohiko Kawakami's comprehensive review of more than a century of research demonstrated that many earlier hypotheses relied excessively upon isolated textual references whilst overlooking broader archaeological and environmental evidence.

This aerial view from 2023 shows the River Diyala at the late Chalcolithic (Copper Age) site of Shakhi Kora in today's Kurdistan region of Iraq

He argued that future investigation should integrate satellite imagery, landscape archaeology, geomorphological reconstruction, and renewed examination of unpublished cuneiform material rather than continuing to propose speculative identification which was based on individual sites. His assessment concluded that the available evidence was sufficient to define a probable search region but not to identify Agade with confidence.

Archaeological work in central Iraq has also been hampered by practical considerations. Decades of conflict, urban expansion, and restricted access have prevented a comprehensive survey of many promising areas.

Even where excavation has been possible, deeply buried third-millennium BC levels often lie beneath later occupations, requiring expensive and technically-demanding investigative work. The absence of evidence therefore is not necessarily evidence of absence.

Many important Mesopotamian cities previously remained unidentified until sustained excavation uncovered diagnostic inscriptions. The situation has greatly improved even across the last two decades with far more documentation now available.

The ancient and modern views

Ancient texts nevertheless continue to provide the strongest clues. Old Babylonian itineraries placed Agade on routes which connected Mari, Sippar, Tutub, and Eshnunna.

These figures are from Eshnunna, probably dating from the period around 2000 BC when the city was experiencing a period of independence and regional power

Administrative records indicated that it functioned both as an administrative centre and a redistribution hub for goods which were being moved between northern and southern Mesopotamia. Royal inscriptions celebrated its temple of Ishtar and its close association with imperial authority.

These documents collectively portrayed a city which occupied one of the most strategically advantageous locations in Mesopotamia, one which controlled communications across both riverine and overland networks.

Despite decades of investigation, today's scholarly consensus remains remarkably restrained. No credible archaeologist claims that Agade has been found.

Instead, opinion at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century AD holds that the capital almost certainly lies somewhere within the central alluvial plain of Iraq, probably near the Baghdad region, concealed either beneath modern settlement or deeply buried river sediments.

Until excavation can recover inscriptions which explicitly name the city, Agade will remain one of archaeology's most compelling unsolved problems, and a reminder that even the capital of one of history's earliest empires can still evade discovery.

Cuneiform tablets rarely survive intact, so this Akkadian example which translates a hymn to the goddess Ishtar from Sumerian is especially valuable

Main Sources

B R Foster - The Age of Agade (Standard Ed)

Christophe M Wall-Romana - An Areal Location of Agade (Journal of Near Eastern Studies, No 49, 1990, pp 205-245)

Joan Goodnick Westenholz - Legends of the Kings of Akkade (Eisenbrauns, 1997)

Mario Liverani - The Ancient Near East: History, Society and Economy (Laterza, 1988)

Naohiko Kawakami - The Location of the Ancient City of Akkade: Review of Past Theories and Identification of Issues for Formulating a Specific Methodology for Searching Akkade (Institute for Cultural Studies of Ancient Iraq, Kokushikan University, 2023)

Additional Sources

Amélie Kuhrt - The Ancient Near East, c.3000-330 BC  (Routledge, 2000, Vol I & II)

Clemens Reichel - Political Change and Cultural Continuity in Eshnunna from the Ur III to the Old Babylonian Period (Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, 11 June 1996)

Enrico Ascalone - Mesopotamia: Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians (Dictionaries of Civilizations 1, University of California Press, 2007)

Gwendolyn Leick - Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City (Penguin Books, 2001)

J N Postgate - Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History (Routledge, 1994)

John Heywood - Historical Atlas of the Ancient World, 4,000,000 to 500 BC (Barnes & Noble, 2000)

Marc van der Mieroop - History of the Ancient Near East c.3000-323 BC (Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 2007)

Michael Road - Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East (Facts on File, 2000)

Online Sources

Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature

Ancient World Magazine

Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project (published between 2003-2021, part of the Babylonian section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology)

Maps and text copyright © P L Kessler. An original feature for the History Files.