![\"<b>Assyria\u2019s](\"https:\/\/static.toiimg.com\/thumb\/msid-133152792,imgsize-2297326,width-400,height-225,resizemode-4\/assyrian-kings-emerge.jpg\" "\\"Representative")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nFor nearly a century, historians have relied on the Assyrian King List as the authoritative record of who ruled the ancient Assyrian Empire, especially during its later centuries. Now, new research suggests that record was never as complete or impartial as scholars believed. By re-examining damaged inscriptions, worn cuneiform tablets and a heavily altered stone monument, two researchers have reconstructed the reigns of three Assyrian kings whose names never made it into the official chronology at all. Their findings indicate these rulers were not simply forgotten by accident, but may have been deliberately removed from the record because their reigns complicated a carefully managed story of orderly royal succession, one that Assyria’s own scribes appear to have curated rather than simply recorded.<\/p>\n The Assyrian King List, often referred to by scholars as the AKL, has functioned for decades as the backbone of Assyrian chronology, particularly for the empire’s final stretch of history known as the Neo-Assyrian period. Researchers studying the Assyrian Empire’s history have relied on it as the definitive record of Assyrian monarchs and the order in which they ruled. That trust made the discovery of three previously unknown kings especially unsettling for Assyriologists, since scholars had generally assumed they already had a fairly complete picture of who occupied the Assyrian throne during this era, leaving little apparent room for entirely new rulers to surface from the historical record.<\/p>\n The first overlooked ruler took the name Tiglath-pileser after an earlier Assyrian king, and evidence suggests he ruled at the same time as the officially recognised monarch A\u0161\u0161ur-dan III, his own nephew, whom he apparently tried to overthrow following a solar eclipse widely interpreted at the time as a dangerous political omen. Evidence for this rebel king survives on a clay tablet held at the British Museum, bearing the inscription of a royal grant issued in his name. Researchers Alexander Johannes Edmonds and Eckart Frahm argue in their study that this Tiglath-pileser most likely ruled for a brief stretch around 763 to 762 BCE before being removed from power entirely.<\/p>\nWhy historians trusted the Assyrian King List for so long<\/b><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
How researchers uncovered a hidden rebel king named
What a defaced stone monument revealed about a hidden king named