ACCAD (ak'kad), ak-kad, a fortress), the name of one of the four cities in Babylonia mentioned in Genesis (Gen. x :10) as belonging to the kingdom of Nimrod in the country of Shinar. It was the residence of the first his torical ruler of all Babylonia. Sargon I, whose active reign dates from 380o B. C., according to the statement of Nabonidus (555-538 B. C.) an inscription discovered in 1881 on the site of Sippar. With Accad are named Babel, Erech and Calneh. Erech and Babel are well known in later history, and their sites have not been lost. The ruins of Calneh have recently been discover ed. (See CALSE11.1Accad is probably the city which is known in the early Babylonian inscriptions under the name of Agade. or Agadi, which is on the Euphrates. north of Babylon. Rawlinson places it at Aker-Kuf, to miles west by north of Bagdad. Delitzsch conjectures that it may have been one of the two cities which bore the name of Sepharvaint, but McCurdy locates this double city in N. Syria (Sec. 349). The \‘'olfe expedition to Babylonia, in 1884-85 (cf. Report, pp.
2q, 25), located it at /Inbar, on the Euphrates, N. W. of the ruins of Babylon. It was probably the capital city of mat Akkadi. The people who first formed this kingdom were the ancient Sumerians. whose racial connections are not yet known. Sonic suppose them to have been the in ventors of the cuneiform system of writing, and laid the basis upon which the whole system of culture of the ancient Babylonians rested.
On the other hand, there is a growing school which maintains that the Semites, whom we know as possessing the cuneiform characters, were the inventors of these last and the developers of Semitic culture, and that the so-called 'Sume rians' and 'Accadians' arc but figments of an over-zealous scientific spirit. Among the mem bers of this school are Profs McCurdy and Ira M. Price, Hastings' Bib. Diet.; McCurdy, Ills. Proph. and the Mon.; Price, The Mon., 0. T.
t See ASSYRIA AND BABYLONIA.) ACCARON (aleka-ron). See EKRON.