Researchers have uncovered evidence of three previously unknown Assyrian kings who ruled during the Neo-Assyrian period, challenging long-held assumptions about the completeness and political neutrality of the ancient Assyrian King List. The findings appear in a new study published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies.
For roughly a century, scholars studying the Assyrian Empire have treated the Assyrian King List as the standard record of the kingdom’s rulers and the order in which they reigned, particularly during the later phases of Assyrian history. But new research demonstrates that the political reality of the ancient empire was far more turbulent than the official record suggests.
Challenging the Assyrian King List
The Assyrian King List is known from three well-preserved cuneiform clay tablets that outline the succession of rulers across the history of the civilization. Based on these texts, scholars long believed that succession during the final centuries of the empire passed without incident, usually from father to son, with little internal disruption.
The king list appears to provide an idealized version of Assyrian kingship in which all unrest, everything unstable, is essentially erased from the record.
Instead of an impartial chronographic work, the authors argue that the document functioned as a legitimizing canon of kings, which was periodically updated to remove short-lived or parallel Neo-Assyrian rulers. The discovery of what look to be three additional kings during the last stage of Assyrian history came as a surprise, with Frahm noting that no one expected there would be room for any new and unknown rulers during this time.
Reconstructing the Lost Rulers
By re-examining poorly preserved cuneiform documents published some time ago but not properly understood, Edmonds and Frahm identified three figures who ruled during the 10th and 8th centuries B.C.E. but were omitted from the official king list. The first ruler used the name Tiglath-pileser, apparently adopting the name of an earlier Assyrian king, and attempted to remove the officially recognized king Aššur-dān III from power, who was also his nephew. Evidence for this administration survives on a clay tablet now held by the British Museum, which records a royal grant and indicates that Tiglath-pileser probably ruled from roughly 763-762 B.C.E. before eventually being deposed.
Scholarly translations had previously assumed the king issuing the grant was Adad-nerari III, who ruled from 810 until his death in 783 B.C.E., while another royal name mentioned on the tablet was previously identified as Tiglath-pileser III, who ruled from 745 to 727. Frahm’s explanation, based on a new reading of the cuneiform in the first line of the text, is that the grant was made under a previously unknown Assyrian prince who assumed the royal name. This scenario is bolstered by the Assyrian Eponym Chronicle, a text in cuneiform which chronicles major events throughout the empire’s history and describes a rebellion and insurgency in the city of Ashur in 763 and 762, an event triggered following a solar eclipse that would have carried major political and religious significance in the ancient world.
A second forgotten king, named Shalmaneser, is proposed by the researchers to have ruled immediately before Tiglath-pileser III came to power in 745 B.C.E. This proposal helps resolve a long-standing puzzle surrounding a stela discovered in 1894 at Tell ‘Abta, Iraq, where researchers have long debated why the name of the Assyrian king originally associated with the monument was overwritten with the name of another Tiglath-pileser. The third case centers on a ruler named Aššur-uballiṭ. A cuneiform text attributed to King Tukultī-Ninurta II refers to a libation vessel originally created by Tukultī-Ninurta I and later restored by Aššur-uballiṭ, even though the AKL lists no king by that name between their reigns. Edmonds and Frahm suggest that a previously unrecognized Aššur-uballit ruled from 913-912 B.C.E., an existence that accounts for the reference on the tablet and could also explain the identity of a royal figure shown in a heavily damaged statue discovered at Aššur with its head removed and its arms and royal insignia worn away.
Broader Implications for Ancient History
The identification of these three hidden monarchs reframes our understanding of Assyrian civilization, which lasted from circa 2025 B.C.E. to 609 B.C.E. Beginning as the city-state of Ashur, located in what is now Iraq, it eventually expanded into a vast empire that dominated much of Western Asia. The research suggests that early Neo-Assyrian political history was much messier, but also more interesting, than has so far been recognized.
By exposing these gaps in the official record of kings, the study gives historians a new way to interpret the AKL and the political motives behind it, raising broader questions about what determined a king’s canonicity and how it intersected with cultural memory. With three previously hidden royal histories now coming into view, the Assyrian King List itself has become a fresh subject of investigation, offering a new perspective on how political legitimacy may have shaped the story of the world’s first empire.
