Near East Kingdoms

Ishan-Mizyad (City) (Sumer)

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The city states of Sumer formed one of the first great civilisations in human history (see feature link). This Near Eastern civilisation emerged a little way ahead of that of Africa's ancient Egypt, and up to a millennium before that of the Indus Valley culture.

It developed out of the end of the Pottery Neolithic across the Fertile Crescent, a period which had seen Neolithic Farmer practices spread far and wide across the Near East and beyond. Southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and the western edge of Iran) was subjected to permanent settlement, initially in the form of pastoralists but soon as farmers too.

By the late fourth millennium BC, Sumer was divided into approximately a dozen independent city states which used local canals and boundary stones to mark their borders. Many of the smaller cities emerged in two broad waves, in the mid-third millennium BC and at the start of the second millennium BC.

The city of Akshak was located in the northern part of Sumer, a short way to the north of Umma. The city of Der lay some way to the direct east, in the Zagros mountain foothills, but a host of smaller cities lay close to it by the start of the second millennium BC, including the modern archaeological site of Tell Mizyad (Ishan-Mizyad) and the cities of Kutha, Nerebtum, Shadlash, Shaduppum, Tutub, and Uzarlulu.

Ishan-Mizyad's ancient identity is yet to be confirmed. One proposition has it as Agade, chief city of the Akkadian empire. The site is fairly large, measuring a thousand metres by six hundred, whilst being relatively low and therefore occupied for a relatively brief period, over perhaps a two millennia period at most. It is located about five kilometres to the north-west of Kish and fifteen kilometres to the east of Babylon, so it falls within the relevant window of a location for Agade.

Its remains date principally to the Akkadian period of the twenty-fourth to twenty-second centuries BC, with about two hundred Old Akkadian administrative texts being uncovered there, mainly lists of workers. Further finds confirm the site's continuity into the twenty-first century BC under the Ur III empire and into the Isin-Larsa and Neo-Babylonian periods.

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(Information by Peter Kessler, with additional information from Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City, Gwendolyn Leick (Penguin Books, 2001), from Encyclopaedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition, Cambridge (England), 1910), from Historical Atlas of the Ancient World, 4,000,000 to 500 BC, John Heywood (Barnes & Noble, 2000), from The Ancient Near East, c.3000-330 BC, Amélie Kuhrt (Routledge, 2000, Vol I & II), from Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East, Michael Road (Facts on File, 2000), from Mesopotamia: Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Enrico Ascalone (Dictionaries of Civilizations 1, University of California Press, 2007), from The Archaeology of Mesopotamia, S Lloyd (Revised Ed, London, 1984), from History of the Ancient Near East c.3000-323 BC, Marc van der Mieroop (Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 2007), and from External Links: Ancient Worlds, and Evolution of Sumerian kingship (Ancient World Magazine), and Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project (Published between 2003-2021, part of the Babylonian section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology), and the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.)

c.2440 BC

Under Enshakushanna, Uruk conquers Hamazi, Agade (possibly the modern site of Ishan-Mizyad), Kish, and Nippur to claim hegemony over all of Sumer. He also throws the Elamites out of Awan. He is the first known ruler to take the Sumerian title en ki-en-gi ki-uri, or 'lord of Sumer and Akkad'.

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)

c.2154 BC

The small remaining Akkadian kingdom collapses and the city is reputedly destroyed, thoroughly, by the occupying Gutians. The king list claims it is Urnigin of Uruk who destroys the city and that the kingship is carried off there, but this may instead be a reference to Uruk regaining the advantage in terms of regional power.

The final Akkadians could be contemporaries of the kings of Uruk, and both are smashed by the Gutian hordes who are themselves expelled from Sumer circa 2120 BC by a later king of Uruk.