under its last king Lugal-Zage-Si, in orange, before the rise of the
Akkadian Empire. Circa 2350 BC. Lugal-Zage-Si pursued an expansionist foreign policy. He began his career as
énsi of Umma, from where he conquered several of the Sumerian city-states. In the seventh year of his reign,
Uruk fell under the leadership of Lugal-Zage-Si,
énsi of
Umma, who ultimately annexed most of the territory of
Lagash under king
Urukagina, and established the first reliably documented kingdom to encompass all of Sumer. The destruction of Lagash was described in a lament (possibly the earliest recorded example of what would become a prolific Sumerian literary genre), which stressed that: Later, Lugal-Zage-Si invaded
Kish, where he overthrew
Ur-Zababa,
Ur,
Nippur, and
Larsa; as well as
Uruk, where he established his new capital. He ruled for 25 (or 34) years according to the
Sumerian King List. Lugal-Zage-Si claimed in his inscription that
Enlil gave to him "all the lands between the upper and the lower seas", that is, between the
Mediterranean Sea and the
Persian Gulf: Although his incursion to the Mediterranean was, in the eyes of some modern scholars, not much more than "a successful raiding party", the inscription "marks the first time that a Sumerian prince claimed to have reached what was, for them, the western edge of the world". (Historical accounts from much later tablets asserted that
Lugal-Anne-Mundu of
Adab, a slightly earlier king, had also conquered as far as the Mediterranean and the Taurus mountains, but contemporary records for the entire period before Sargon are still far too sketchy to permit scholars to reconstruct actual events with great confidence.) Lugal-Zage-Si himself was in turn defeated and his kingdom was annexed by
Sargon of Akkad. According to later Babylonian versions of Sargon's inscriptions, Sargon of Akkad captured Lugal-Zage-Si after destroying the walls of Uruk, and led him in a neck-stock to Enlil's temple in
Nippur: ==Nippur vase of Lugalzagesi==