La Chute d'Akkade: L'Evenement et sa memoire.

• Author: Michalowski, Piotr

The dynasty of Agade ruled Sumer and Akkad for approximately one century, between 2200 and 2100 B.C. Much archaeological and epigraphic data from those hundred-or-so years has been recovered, and yet we know very little about the history of the period. Our vision has been clouded by the work of later poets and propagandists, for the Dynasty of Agade was one that broke new ground in political propaganda and acquired legendary status in the memories of later scribes. More than a thousand years after the fall of the Akkad state, Assyrian writers composed a fictitious autobiography of Sargon, the founder of the dynasty, and compositions concerning him, as well as those dealing with his grandson, Naram-Sin, were revised and copied in the last Assyrian libraries. We therefore know much more about the historiographic reinterpretations of later writers than we do about the times of the Akkad kings - so much so that the end of the dynasty is completely undocumented. There are no contemporary records of the process that led to the fall of the city, nor of the immediate circumstances of that debacle. Unlike any other city in Mesopotamian historiography, Akkad was never fully occupied again, and it appears only rarely in later sources. This fall, its consequences, and the remembrance of the event in Mesopotamian written memory, are the subject of this book by Jean-Jacques Glassner.

In view of the fact that there have been few synthetic monographic treatments of this historical period, the work under review acquires a special status and will undoubtedly be consulted by historians who do not have a working familiarity with all the sources utilized by Glassner. It is therefore important that the author opens his analysis with a general chapter on "the original characteristics of Akkadian imperialism" in which he discusses not only the practical elements of political structure but also argues for the reconstruction of the native ideology of empire of the times. This is followed by the two major chapters of the book: the first is on the "event history" of the Akkadian dynasty, followed by a chapter on the ways in which this series of events was transformed in later memory. The book ends with a short synthesis.

At the very beginning of his work Glassner sounds a series of warnings on the limits of historical understanding. He is very much aware of the paucity of information for a period when texts were rarely dated, the wording of administrative texts was...