Sargon of Akkad rose from obscurity to conquer all of Mesopotamia and build the first empire in recorded history around 2334 BCE. His origin story reads like Moses: abandoned as an infant in a basket on the river, rescued, and raised to greatness.

This episode traces the founding of the Akkadian Empire and asks what we can actually know about a ruler who lived more than four thousand years ago.

• The legend of his birth and its parallels to later foundling myths
• How he unified Sumer and Akkad into a single empire
• The administrative innovations that held his empire together
• Why his empire collapsed within a century of his death