Note 128 — III. THE CITIES OF MESOPOTAMIA

The Akkadian rulers were themselves apparently too close to the period of local autonomy to draw up a single king list for the whole land. This was done under Utuhegal (ca. 2100 B.C.), the destroyer of the Gutian invaders who had overthrown the rule of Akkad. Utuhegal’s “pride in new independence and in the ‘kingship’ which had been brought back” led to the compilation of the country-wide list in which the traditional lists of local rulers of the important cities were combined (Thorkild Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List, Chicago, 1939). Thus a conception of kingship established by the Sargonid dynasty was projected into the past.