Iron Age · 10th–8th century BC · Ashur, Iraq
Three forgotten Assyrian kings identified in old cuneiform texts from Iraq
Yale and Münster researchers argue that three short-lived Neo-Assyrian rulers of the 10th and 8th centuries BC were later removed from the official Assyrian King List.
Peer-reviewed paper
Ashur, Iraq Three kings who ruled Assyria between about 913 and 745 BC were left out of the empire's official records, according to a new study of long-known cuneiform texts. Each of them ruled for less than two years. Alexander Johannes Edmonds of the University of Münster and Eckart Frahm of Yale University published the case in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies.
No new tablets were excavated. The pair reread damaged inscriptions and compared them with other ancient records. Some of these records have been available for decades, and one for more than 125 years.
The first proposed ruler is an Ashur-uballit who reigned around 913 to 912 BC. The second is a rebel Tiglath-pileser who held the city of Ashur in 763 and 762 BC. The third is a Shalmaneser who appears to have ruled from late 747 to 745 BC.
None of them appears in the Assyrian King List. The list survives in several cuneiform copies. It has long been the backbone of modern reconstructions of the royal succession.
Edmonds and Frahm argue that the list was an authorised version of royal history rather than a complete register. In their view, it presents power passing smoothly, usually from father to son. Frahm had already raised the possibility of unlisted kings in his 2023 book Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire.
A land grant from the wrong year
The strongest case rests on Rm 75, a badly damaged clay tablet found at Nineveh. It is now in the British Museum. It records a royal grant of land to a private individual.
The tablet is dated by the eponym system, under which each Assyrian year was named after a high official. The year given is 762 BC.
Earlier scholars attributed the grant to Adad-nirari III, who died in 783 BC. They took the Tiglath-pileser named in the text to be Tiglath-pileser III, who reigned from 745 to 727 BC. Neither king was on the throne in 762 BC.
Frahm's new reading of the damaged opening replaces the name Adad-nirari with Tiglath-pileser. On this interpretation, the grant was issued by a previously unknown son of Shamshi-Adad V. This son took an established royal name.
Impressions of the royal seal survive on the tablet. Its references to the god Ashur and to Ishtar of Ashur suggest it was issued in Ashur, Assyria's religious centre.
The Assyrian Eponym Chronicle records a revolt in Ashur in both 763 and 762 BC. It also records a solar eclipse in 763 BC and a plague in 765 BC.
The researchers reconstruct the rebel as the uncle of the reigning king, Ashur-dan III. They suggest he used the eclipse to claim the throne while his nephew remained at Kalhu (Nimrud). An eclipse could be read as an omen of a ruler's fall.
His rule may have lasted no more than 20 or 21 months. The evidence does not show whether he died, was executed or kept fighting elsewhere.
A changed name on a stela and a silver beer vessel
The second king comes from a stone stela found at Tell Abta in Iraq in the late 19th century. It is now in the Ancient Orient Museum in Istanbul. It belonged to Bel-Harran-belu-usur, a senior palace official who founded a new settlement in the desert.
The inscription originally named the king as Shalmaneser. The name was later overwritten with Tiglath-pileser. Earlier attempts to match this Shalmaneser with known kings required awkward gaps or unusually long careers.
Edmonds and Frahm propose instead that an unknown Shalmaneser succeeded Ashur-nirari V in late 747 BC. In their reconstruction, he ruled for about a year and a half before Tiglath-pileser III took power in 745 BC.
They say this also explains irregularities in the eponym records and conflicting accounts of the length of Tiglath-pileser III's reign. The argument here is less direct than for the rebel Tiglath-pileser.
The earliest king is named on a tablet from Ashur. It describes a silver vessel used to pour beer for the god Ashur. Tukulti-Ninurta I made the vessel, an Ashur-uballit repaired it and Tukulti-Ninurta II restored it again.
Ashur-uballit I lived too early to fit this sequence. The king known as Ashur-uballit II lived nearly three centuries too late. The text calls the earlier benefactors royal ancestors, so the researchers find it hard to treat this Ashur-uballit as a private citizen.
They think he briefly succeeded Ashur-dan II before being overthrown by Adad-nirari II. Adad-nirari was probably another member of the royal family.
As a sign that Adad-nirari seized the throne, the researchers point to a royal statue at Ashur. It was decapitated and stripped of its insignia. It was then turned into a monument bearing his genealogy.
Uneven evidence, and possible new numbers for later kings
All three cases are historical reconstructions, and the evidence is uneven. The Shalmaneser and Ashur-uballit reigns depend on several sources read together.
The findings do not change the Assyrian chronology after 911 BC, which rests on continuous annual records. If the three rulers are accepted, later kings named Tiglath-pileser and Shalmaneser may need new numbers.
Sources
- Names of Three Previously Unknown Kings of the Assyrian Empire from the 10th to 8th Centuries BCE Discovered on Cuneiform Tablets (La Brújula Verde)
- Ancient Cuneiform Records Reveal Three Forgotten Kings of Assyria (Arkeonews)
- Three forgotten Assyrian kings identified in ancient texts (Archaeology News)
Paper: Edmonds, A. J., & Frahm, E. (2026). Three new kings of Assyria. Journal of Cuneiform Studies, 78, 27–59. https://doi.org/10.1086/741239
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