Eulbar in Agade, in honour of Anunit, the goddess presiding over the morning star.  He erected in Babylon a palace which afterwards became a royal burying-place.  He founded a new capital, a city which he peopled with families brought from Kishu and Babylon:  for a long time after his day it bore the name which he bestowed upon it, Dur-Sharrukin.  This sums up all the positive knowledge we have about him, and the later Chaldseans seem not to have been much better informed than ourselves.

* The earliest Assyriologists, H. Rawlinson, Oppert, considered the local kings as having been, for the most part, kings of all Chaldaea, and placed them in succession one after the other in the framework of the most ancient dynasties of Berossus.  The merit of having established the existence of series of local dynasties, and of having given to Chaldaean history its modern form, belongs to G. Smith.  Smith’s idea was adopted by Menant, by Delitzsch-Murdter, by Tiele, by Winckler, and by all Assyriologists, with modifications suggested by the progress of decipherment.

They filled up the lacunae of his history with legends.  As he seemed to them to have appeared suddenly on the scene, without any apparent connection with the king who preceded him, they assumed that he was a usurper of unknown origin, irregularly introduced by the favour of the gods into the lawful series of kings.  An inscription engraved, it was said, on one of his statues, and afterwards, about the VIIth century B.C., copied and deposited in the library of Nineveh, related at length the circumstances of his mysterious birth.  “Sharrukin, the mighty king, the king of Agade, am I. My mother was a princess; my father, I did not know him; the brother of my father lived in the mountains.  My town was Azupirani, which is situated on the bank of the Euphrates.  My mother, the princess, conceived me, and secretly gave birth to me:  she placed me in a basket of reeds, she shut up the mouth of it with bitumen, she abandoned me to the river, which did not overwhelm me.  The river bore me; it brought me to Akki, the drawer of water.  Akki, the drawer of water, received me in the goodness of his heart; Akki, the drawer of water, made me a gardener.  As gardener, the goddess Ishtar loved me, and during forty-four years I held royal sway; I commanded the Black Heads,* and ruled them.”  This is no unusual origin for the founders of empires and dynasties; witness the cases of Cyrus and Bomulus.* Sargon, like Moses, and many other heroes of history or fable, is exposed to the waters:  he owes his safety to a poor fellah who works his shadouf on the banks of the Euphrates to water the fields, and he passes his infancy in obscurity, if not in misery.  Having reached the age of manhood, Ishtar falls in love with him as she did with his fellow-craftsman, the gardener Ishullanu, and he becomes king, we know not by what means.