The title “King of the Four River Banks” (šar kibrātim arba’im in Akkadian) was introduced around 2200 B.C. by Naram-Sin, king of Akkad, to refer to what we call “Mesopotamia”, a Greek term and concept (“land between the rivers”) which was alien to the ancients who lived there.
The “four river banks” are the two banks of the Tigris and of the Euphrates respectively, the “bank” being the starting point of the irrigation system which characterized the territory from the middle course of the rivers down to the Gulf.
Naram-Sin chose the term to refer to the new political reality which his gandfather, Sargon, had started to implement and he had consolidated. It was a title charged with political significance, but also highly relevant for cultural history: it stressed the value of territorial contiguity as a factor of social integration. (In later times, when imperial expansion went beyond the two river valleys, the term acquired the meaning of “four quarters of the world.”)
With the changing of political horizons, and especially with the development of a new imperial perception of the territory, the tie to the river banks became less significant, and so, in later times, the term came to refer to the four “edges” of the world or, as it is normally understood, the four “quarters” of the world, hance the whole of the civilized world.
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