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Sargon: Kings
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As stated in an annotation to his name in the king list, Sargon started out as a cupbearer to King Ur-Zababa of Kish. There is an Akkadian legend about Sargon, describing how he was exposed after birth, brought up by a gardener, and later beloved by the goddess Ishtar. Nevertheless, there are no historical data about his career. Yet it is feasible to assume that in his case a high court office served as springboard for a dynasty of his own. The original inscriptions of the kings of Akkad that have come down to posterity are brief, and their geographic distribution generally is more informative than is their content.The main sources for Sargon's reign, with its high points and catastrophes, are copies made by Old Babylonian scribes in Nippur from the very extensive originals that presumably had been kept there. They are in part Akkadian, in part bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian texts.
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Sargon, the future ruler of all of Mesopotamia, grew from humble beginnings. The early years of Sargon's life are speculation. One legend says Sargon was the son of a high priestess. Upon his birth she placed Sargon in a reed basket and set him adrift in a river where he was found by a fruit grower. Sargon eventually rose to become the cup bearer to the king of Kish, Ur-Zababa.
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The last decade or so of Sargon's reign was troubled with rebellions. While sources say that Sargon was punished by the gods, modern historical science rely more on a theory that the administration as well as Sargon's own ruling abilities were not strong enough for a large kingdom as his.
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According to the Sumerian king list and other records, Sargon reigned for fifty-six years, and then the kingship was passed to his son, Rimuc, who battled endless rebellions for nine years. The kingship then passed on to Sargon’s other son, and finally to his grandson, Naram-Suen. During his reign, the empire began to unravel as city-states broke away from the empire. Soon after, a barbaric tribe from the Zagros mountains to the east invaded and conquered the Akkadian empire.
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From the Sumerian king list: "in Agade, Sargon, whose father was a gardener, the cupbearer of Ur-Zababa, became king, the king of Agade, who built Agade; he ruled for 56 years." Confusingly, Ur-Zababa and Lugal-zage-si are both listed as kings, but several generations apart - perhaps Ur-Zababa is supposed to have lived on in the palace of Kish long after losing the kingship of Sumer. Sargon is the successor to Lugal-zage-si and is the founder of a new dynasty: his son is Rimuc.
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Sargon, it appears, has disappeared from the Assyrian scene at a point about mid-way through his presumed 17-year reign! That is a real problem for the textbook writers who, meanwhile, entirely ignore the four-way correlation (a-d above) - which their fixed chronological scheme cannot possibly accommodate. They instead make Hezekiah a late contemporary of Sargon's, dating the Judaean king to c.716-687 BC. This means that Hezekiah would have begun to reign about a decade later than where 2 Kings locates him; way too late for him to have been king of Judah during the Fall of Samaria as the Bible says he was. Aitchison tells how the Assyrian computation mesmerised even biblicist, Edwin Thiele [23]:
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