Sargon
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Biography
In the sixth year of the reign of Ur-Zababa, divine ruler of Kish, his cup-bearer came to him with a dream: should his rule continue, four-fifths of the population would perish - but his reign would continue. Deeply troubled, Ur-Zababa stalled, claiming he would step down when it could be shown that his servant's dream was a true one.
When the people of Kish began to die of an unknown plague, Ur-Zababa still refused to abdicate. Instead, he sent his cup-bearer to his own lord Lugal-zage-si, god-emperor of the Sumerian Empire in Uruk, bearing a message. The cup-bearer was told by one of Ur-Zababa's concubines that the message would instruct the emperor to kill the messenger; still, he could not refuse an order with a divine mandate. He delivered the message faithfully, informing the emperor he was aware of the contents.
Lugal-zage-si saw no reason to question the judgement of his loyal minion Ur-Zababa, and began to pronounce the sentence of death upon the young man. When he spoke, though, the words that came from his mouth were in the voice of Marduk, father of law: "He who would slay a loyal servant, may walk like a king, may speak like a king, may claim to be a king, but cannot ever be the lawful king. My blessing upon the Sumerians is withdrawn."
The cup-bearer fled Uruk, rushing back to Kish before news of the god's words could warn Ur-Zababa. Almost half the population had the plague, and many were dead already. In the king's bedroom, the young man throttled his lord, refusing to delegate the assassination to a subordinate so the consequences would fall on him alone.
The cup-bearer kneeled at the feet of the corpse and prayed, confessing his crime. The two mouths of Marduk appeared on the wall before him. The uppermost mouth said "For acting in the right, you shall be given an empire, the greatest the world has yet seen. Your name is Sargon, the true king; you have never had any other." And the whatever name the cup-bearer might have had was erased; it had never existed.
But the lower mouth also spoke. "For the crime of regicide, you will see your empire squandered, crushed, and utterly forgotten. This is the pronouncement of Marduk upon Sargon of Agade; no man may thwart this judgement."
With the divine power of law, Sargon could read the true character of his subjects and compel them to obey. He also ruled the world of matter, able to manipulate objects and cure sickness and injury. Armed with these powers he first cured the plague, then conquered Kish and ultimately all Sumeria. Dragging Lugal-zage-si in stocks to the Temple of Enlil, he commanded the former emperor to serve there the rest of his life: Sargon would not commit another regicide, even of a deposed despot.
The Akkadian Empire
Sargon combined the mystic powers of the Sumerians (which had been learned from the Lemurians) with his own divine power. Mindful of Marduk's judgement, he sought not to evade it, but instead to delay its consequences so his people would not suffer. To this end he created the Memory of Kings, a set of tablets to record his soul, memories and divine right for future rulers. In it, his consciousness, and those of his descendants, would live on. Marduk's sentence would not be denied, but it could be mitigated.
Each king would record himself in the tablets, teaching and advising their successors. Sargon designed the Memory of Kings so that none could compel their descendants in any way; he knew that claiming eternal power for himself beyond his mortal span would offend the gods. King succeeded king, dynasty succeeded dynasty, for over 1500 years - until Ashurnasirpal II ascended to the throne and instituted a brutal program of expansion and tyranny, made possible through a perversion of the divine mandate.
Ashurnasirpal used his powers to become a contagious psychic vampire. All who paid him homage would contribute, unknowingly, a fraction of their own psyches to him. Those that served them would contribute a part of themselves in turn, down to the lowliest peasant. While Ashurnasirpal could never steal more than 2% of his subject's energies, he ruled an empire of more than a million. The energy he returned to the ether with a copy of his own will attached, so that he forged his empire into a single monolithic engine of conquest.
This power he taught his sons, so that the empire (now known as the Assyrian Empire, with its capital at Nineveh) would be able to conquer the world. With the collective power of the whole world, his descendants would be able to eliminate free will entirely.
How the empire fell is still debated: some believe it was civil war, Ashurnasirpal's grandchildren turning on each other; others believe the rest of Mesopotamia united to crush the threat. Likely, it was a combination of both - Marduk acting through mortals to preserve the balance. The last remnants of the Akkadian Empire fell in 627 BCE, in the 42nd year of the reign of Ashurbanipal. The Memory of Kings - now 47 tablets long, one for each legitimate king - was lost.
Sargon the Great
Sargon still exists, now in the mind of Josie Czertawa, a doctoral student of Assyriology. While the Memory of Kings would only bestow its knowledge on a legitimate descendant of Sargon, by the early 21st century this included a significant fraction of the human race. Josie was only unique in having the knowledge to decipher the tablets, and is so Sargon's lineal successor - until she, too, dies, and is enshrined in a tablet of her own.
Sargon is foremost among the 47 kings, revered by the others for his wisdom and intuitive understanding of me (righteousness). Even the tyrants of the Neo-Assyrian Empire defer to him, though they have designs of their own.
