Sargon of Akkad

A legend about his birth, known from an inscription, offers an ancient parallel for Moses's infancy.

The account of Moses's mother setting him afloat in a Nile basket closely resembles legends about other Near Eastern rulers. One concerns Sargon I, who founded Mesopotamia's first great empire around 2300 BCE: his inscription says his mother put him in a reed basket on a river, and he was found by a water-drawer, Akki, who raised him.1 The timeline records the life of Sargon I, 'the Great', founder of one of the earliest centralized empires in Mesopotamia (2334 to 2279 BCE), and the promulgation of the law code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi in the nineteenth or eighteenth century BCE.2