In connection with this legend we would call the attention of the reader once more to the fact that not merely the identity of this Shargena with our Sharganisharali, his deeds and warlike expeditions recorded in the so-called “Tablet of Omens,” with the date of his rule, have been doubted, but even his very existence. A series of new facts connected with the time of Naram-Sin and Sharganisharali have since come to light by the publication of a great number of contract-tablets written during the reign of these kings. These tablets are to be found in Revue d’Assyriologie, iv, No. iii. Hence it is now impossible to doubt the historicity of Sharganisharali, as was done by Niebuhr.
Down to the time of Hilprecht’s publication of Old Babylonian Inscriptions, Part I, our knowledge of Sargon I was almost entirely drawn from the “legend” and the “Tablet of Omens.” Hence it happened that the great deeds which were attributed to Sargon and Naram-Sin in the “Tablet of Omens” were said to be “purely legendary” (so by Winckler, Geschichte Babylon. und Assyr., p. 38). Others thought that his deeds had been simply projected backwards (so Maspero, Dawn of Civilization, New York, 1895, p. 599; “Sargon II is he who projected backward”); others again, not believing that Sargon I could have undertaken such expeditions and have become practically the “king of the four corners of the earth,” invented another king Sargon (so Hommel, Gesch. Baby. und Assyr., Berlin, 1883, p. 307, note 4; this Sargon he places at about 2000 B.C.).
Thanks to the excavations at Telloh and the industry of Thureau-Dangin, we are now in a position to prove that the statements of the “Tablet of Omens” are correct in almost every particular.
Let us hear what this “Tablet of Omens” has to say. Eleven of these “omens” are ascribed to Sargon and two to Naram-Sin. They generally begin with the phrase: “When the moon was in such and such position,” then Sargon, etc.
The first omen records Sargon’s expedition to and subjection of Elam.
The second tells how he marched to the land Akharri (i.e. the West-land), and subjected it, and that his army subjugated the kibrati irbitta, i.e. “the four corners of the world.”
The third tells us that he brought sorrow upon Kish and Babylon, and built a city after the pattern (?) of Agade, and called it Ub-da-ki, i.e. “place (city) of the world.”
The fourth records another expedition against the West and the taking possession of the four corners of the earth. So also the fifth omen.
The sixth omen is too fragmentary to yield any certain sense.
The seventh gives us a fuller account of the expedition against Akharri; he crosses the sea of the West and wages war against it for three years, takes it, erects there his statues, and transports the prisoners, whom he had taken, over land and sea.