Sargon II ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 722 to 705 BC as one of its most successful kings. In his final military campaign, Sargon was killed in battle in the south-eastern Anatolian region Tabal and the Assyrian army was unable to retrieve his body, which meant that he could not undergo the traditional royal Assyrian burial. In ancient Mesopotamia, not being buried was believed to condemn the dead to becoming a hungry and restless ghost for eternity. As a result, the Assyrians believed that Sargon must have committed some grave sin in order to suffer this fate. His son and successor Sennacherib (r. 705–681), convinced of Sargon's sin, consequently spent much effort to distance himself from his father and to rid the empire from his work and imagery. Sennacherib's efforts led to Sargon only rarely being mentioned in later texts. When modern Assyriology took form in Western Europe in the 18th century, historians mainly followed the writings of classical Greco-Roman authors and the descriptions of Assyria in the Hebrew Bible for information. Given that Sargon is barely mentioned in either, he was consequently forgotten, the then prevalent historical reconstructions placing Sennacherib as the direct successor of Sargon's predecessor Shalmaneser V and identifying Sargon as an alternate name for one of the more well-known kings.
After centuries of Sargon being forgotten, there were important developments in Assyriology in the 19th century and the traditional reconstruction of Assyrian history became increasingly challenged in the scholarly community. In 1825, Ernst Friedrich Karl Rosenmüller was the first to recognize Sargon, based solely on the name's single appearance in the Bible, as a distinct king. Though there was some further scholarly support during the years that followed, the most significant developments came after the ruins of Sargon's ancient capital city, Dur-Sharrukin, were discovered by Paul-Émile Botta in 1843. Before the cuneiform inscriptions were deciphered in 1847 it was impossible to identify the builder of the city. In 1845, Isidore Löwenstern was the first to suggest Sargon as the builder; though Löwenstern's analysis had little scientific basis, his conclusion was by coincidence correct. Sargon was securely identified as the builder of Dur-Sharrukin by Adrien Prévost de Longpérier in 1847, after the inscriptions had been deciphered. Sargon was despite this not immediately recognized as a distinct king, with some still preferring to view him as the same person as one of the more well-established kings. Works published in the 1850s and 1860s, most prominently publications by Edward Hincks, Austen Henry Layard and George Smith, slowly turned Sargon into a textbook entity. In 1886, he received his own entry in the Ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica and by the beginning of the 20th century he was as well-accepted and recognized as any of the other great Neo-Assyrian kings.