by which Sargon's name was recovered and his position in history deduced. Sargon's name was first met with in certain explanatory texts of a religious or astrological character, which had been recovered from Ashur-bani-pal's library at Nineveh. Here we find references to the name Sharru-ukîn,[1] or Sargon, king of Agade, from which it appeared that he had played an important part in Assyrian heroic mythology.[2] In the year 1867, attention was first directed to Sargon's place in history when Sir Henry Rawlinson briefly announced his discovery of the famous Legend of Sargon,[3] in which the king is represented as recounting in the first person the story of his birth and boyhood, his elevation to the throne and his subsequent empire. The text of the Legend was published in 1870,[4] and two years later it was translated by George Smith, who added a translation of the Omens of Sargon and Narâm-Sin, which he had just come across in the collections of tablets from Kuyunjik.[5] Smith followed Rawlinson in ascribing to Sargon the building of the temple E-ulmash in Agade, by restoring his name as that of Narâm-Sin's father in the broken cylinder of Nabonidus found by Taylor at Mukayyar.[6] Up to this time no original text of Shar-Gani-sharri's reign was known. The first to be published was the beautiful cylinder-seal of Ibni-sharru, a high official in Shar-Gani-sharri's service, of which Ménant gave a description in 1877,[7] and again in 1883.[8] Ménant read the king's name as "Shegani-shar-lukh," and he did not identify him with Sargon the elder (whom he put in the nineteenth century B.C.), but suggested that he was a still earlier king of Akkad. In 1882 an account was published of the Abû Habba cylinder of Nabonidus, which records his restoration of E-babbar and contains the passage concerning the date of Narâm-Sin, "the son of Sargon."[9] In the following year the British Museum acquired the famous mace-head of Shar-Gani-sharri, which had been dedicated by him to Shamash in his great temple at Sippar; this was the first actual inscription of Shar-Gani-sharri to be found. In place of Ménant's reading "Shegani-shar-lukh," the name was read as "Shargani," the two final syllables being cut off from it and treated as a title, and, in spite of some dissentients, the identity of Shargani of Agade with Sargon the elder was assumed as certain.[10] Unlike Sargon, the historical character of Narâm-Sin presented no difficulties. His name had been read upon the vase discovered by M. Fresnel at Babylon and afterwards lost in the Tigris;[11] and, although he was there called simply "king of the four quarters," his identification with the Narâm-Sin mentioned by Nabonidus on his cylinder from Ur was unquestioned. Further proof of the correctness of the identification was seen in the occurrence of the name of Magan upon the vase, when it was discovered that the second section of his Omens recorded his conquest of that country.[12]