For approximately a century, researchers studying the Assyrian Empire’s history have relied on the Assyrian King List (AKL) as the definitive record of Assyrian monarchs and their chronology, especially for later periods of Assyrian history. But a recent article published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies , entitled “ Three New Kings of Assyria ,” posits that the AKL may not be as authoritative or as objective as previously considered, and presents for the first time the identities of three kings whose reigns were omitted from the list, but can now reconstructed from other evidence. Ultimately, write Alexander Johannes Edmonds and Eckart Frahm, “early Neo-Assyrian political history was much messier, but also more interesting, than has so far been recognized.”
The first previously overlooked king revealed by Edmonds and Frahm called himself Tiglath-pileser, after a former ruler of the kingdom. This new Tiglath-pileser ruled in parallel to the official king, Aššur-dān III, who was his nephew, and whom he attempted to overthrow in the wake of a portentous solar eclipse. Records of his administration persist in a clay tablet housed in the British Museum that is inscribed with a royal grant, and suggest that he reigned from roughly 763-762 BCE before he was deposed.
Evidence for the second king comes from a stela discovered in 1894 in Tell ‘Abta, Iraq, and the long-standing controversy surrounding the overwriting of the name of the contemporary Assyrian monarch on the stela with that of another “Tiglath-pileser.” This mystery can be put to rest, write Edmonds and Frahm, through the admission of another monarch to the list of kings, a Shalmaneser who reigned immediately prior to the accession of Tiglath-pileser III in 745 BCE.
The third case investigated by Edmonds and Frahm is that of Aššur-uballiṭ. In a text on a cuneiform tablet, king Tukultī-Ninurta II describes a libation vessel created by Tukultī-Ninurta I and later restored by Aššur-uballit—but no monarch of that name is recorded in the AKL between Tukultī-Ninurta I and Tukultī-Ninurta II. The reign from 913-912 BCE of a previously unremarked Aššur-uballit, write Edmonds and Frahm, would explain this reference, as well as the identity of a king represented by a statue discovered at Aššur whose head has been removed and whose arms and insignia are worn away.
The existence of these three kings, write the authors, invites a reconsideration of the AKL. Perhaps it is not “an impartial chronographic work” but rather "a legitimizing canon of kings, which was periodically updated to remove short-lived or parallel Neo-Assyrian rulers." This political dimension of the AKL, Edmonds and Frahm continue, opens up new ways of studying the list: “What and who determined a king’s ‘canonicity’? How did this intersect with Assyrian cultural memory or notions of kingship? Was the AKL’s function at all practical, or solely ceremonial?” With three hidden stories uncovered—so far—the AKL becomes a renewed object of interest and inquiry. In turn, the early history of the Assyrian Empire has suddenly become much more complicated, but also exciting than previously thought. As such, Edmonds and Frahm’s discovery offers a dynamic new perspective on the formation of the world’s first empire.
Journal of Cuneiform Studies
Three New Kings of Assyria