Study Argues Three Forgotten Kings Are Missing From Assyria's Official Record

For about a century, scholars have treated the Assyrian King List as the standard record of who ruled the Assyrian Empire and in what order. A new study in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies, titled "Three New Kings of Assyria" by Alexander Johannes Edmonds and Eckart Frahm, argues the list may be neither complete nor politically neutral, identifying three rulers missing from it whose reigns the authors reconstruct from other evidence.

The first is a ruler who took the name Tiglath-pileser, apparently adopting an earlier king's name, and seems to have ruled alongside the officially recognised king Aššur-dān the Third, his nephew. He reportedly tried to remove Aššur-dān the Third from power after a solar eclipse, seen at the time as highly significant. A clay tablet in the British Museum recording a royal grant indicates he ruled from roughly 763 to 762 BCE before being deposed.

The second comes from a stela found in 1894 at Tell 'Abta in Iraq, where the name of the Assyrian king originally honoured on the monument was overwritten with the name of another "Tiglath-pileser." Edmonds and Frahm propose this puzzle is explained by a previously unrecognised king named Shalmaneser, whom they suggest ruled immediately before Tiglath-pileser the Third took power in 745 BCE.

The third case involves a ruler named Aššur-uballiṭ. A cuneiform text attributed to King Tukultī-Ninurta the Second describes a libation vessel, originally made by Tukultī-Ninurta the First, that was later restored by this Aššur-uballiṭ, even though the Assyrian King List names no king between the two Tukultī-Ninurta reigns. The authors suggest he ruled from 913 to 912 BCE, which could also identify the subject of a damaged, headless statue found at the ancient city of Aššur.

The researchers argue the Assyrian King List may have functioned less as an impartial chronological record and more as "a legitimizing canon of kings," periodically updated to remove short-lived or rival Neo-Assyrian rulers.