List of Assyrian kings
The king of Assyria was the ruler of the ancient Mesopotamian kingdom of Assyria, which was founded in the late 21st century BC and fell in the late 7th century BC. For much of its early history, Assyria was little more than a city-state, centered on the city Assur, but from the 14th century BC onwards, Assyria rose under a series of warrior kings to become one of the major political powers of the Ancient Near East, and in its last few centuries it dominated the region as the largest empire the world had seen thus far. Ancient Assyrian history is typically divided into the Old, Middle and Neo-Assyrian periods, all marked by ages of ascendancy and decline.
The ancient Assyrians did not believe that their king was divine himself, but saw their ruler as the vicar of their principal deity, Ashur, and as his chief representative on Earth. In their worldview, Assyria represented a place of order while lands not governed by the Assyrian king were seen as places of chaos and disorder. As such it was seen as the king's duty to expand the borders of Assyria and bring order and civilization to lands perceived as uncivilized. As Assyria expanded, its rulers gradually adopted grander and more boastful titles. Early kings used , considering the god Ashur to be the true king. From the time of Ashur-uballit I, the rulers instead used king. In time, further titles, such as "king of Sumer and Akkad", "king of the Universe" and "king of the Four Corners of the World", were added, often to assert their control over all of Mesopotamia.
All modern lists of Assyrian kings generally follow the Assyrian King List, a list kept and developed by the ancient Assyrians themselves over the course of several centuries. Though some parts of the list are probably fictional, the list accords well with Hittite, Babylonian and ancient Egyptian king lists and with the archaeological record, and is generally considered reliable for the age. The line of Assyrian kings ended with the defeat of Assyria's final king Ashur-uballit II by the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Median Empire in 609 BC, after which Assyria disappeared as an independent political unit, never to rise again. The Assyrian people survived the fall of their empire and kept their own cultural and religious traditions. At times, Assur and other Assyrian cities were afforded great deals of autonomy by its foreign rulers after the 7th century BC, particularly under the Achaemenid and Parthian empires.
Introduction
Titles
Assyrian royal titles typically followed trends that had begun under the Akkadian Empire, the Mesopotamian civilization that preceded the later kingdoms of Assyria and Babylon. When the Mesopotamian central government under the Third Dynasty of Ur collapsed and polities that had once been vassals to Ur became independent, many of the new sovereign rulers refrained from taking the title of king, instead applying that title to their principal deities. For this reason, most of the Assyrian kings of the Old Assyrian period used the title, translating to "governor of Assyria".In contrast to the titles employed by the Babylonian kings in the south, which typically focused on the protective role and the piety of the king, Assyrian royal inscriptions tend to glorify the strength and power of the king. Assyrian titularies usually also often emphasize the royal genaeology of the king, something Babylonian titularies do not, and also drive home the king's moral and physical qualities while downplaying his role in the judicial system. Assyrian epithets about royal lineage vary in how far they stretch back, most often simply discussing lineage in terms of "son of..." or "brother of...". Some cases display lineage stretching back much further, Shamash-shum-ukin describes himself as a "descendant of Sargon II", his great-grandfather. More extremely, Esarhaddon calls himself a "descendant of the eternal seed of Bel-bani", a king who lived more than a thousand years before him.
Assyrian royal titularies were often changed depending on where the titles were to be displayed, the titles of the same Assyrian king would have been different in their home country of Assyria and in conquered regions. Those Neo-Assyrian kings who controlled the city of Babylon used a "hybrid" titulary of sorts in the south, combining aspects of the Assyrian and Babylonian tradition, similar to how the traditional Babylonian deities were promoted in the south alongside the Assyrian main deity of Ashur. The assumption of many traditional southern titles, including the ancient "king of Sumer and Akkad" and the boastful "king of the Universe" and "king of the Four Corners of the World", by the Assyrian kings served to legitimize their rule and assert their control over Babylon and lower Mesopotamia. Epithets like "chosen by the god Marduk and the goddess Sarpanit" and "favourite of the god Ashur and the goddess Mullissu", both assumed by Esarhaddon, illustrate that he was both Assyrian and a legitimate ruler over Babylon.
To exemplify an Assyrian royal title from the time Assyria ruled all of Mesopotamia, the titulature preserved in one of Esarhaddon's inscriptions reads as follows:
Role of the Assyrian king
Ancient Assyria was an absolute monarchy, with the king believed to be appointed directly through divine right by the chief deity, Ashur. The Assyrians believed that the king was the link between the gods and the earthly realm. As such, it was the king's primary duty to discover the will of the gods and enact this, often through the construction of temples or waging war. To aid the king with this duty, there was a number of priests at the royal court trained in reading and interpreting signs from the gods.The heartland of the Assyrian realm, Assyria itself, was thought to represent a serene and perfect place of order whilst the lands governed by foreign powers were perceived as infested with disorder and chaos. The peoples of these "outer" lands were seen as uncivilized, strange and as speaking strange languages. Because the king was the earthly link to the gods, it was his duty to spread order throughout the world through the military conquest of these strange and chaotic countries. As such, imperial expansion was not just expansion for expansion's sake but was also seen as a process of bringing divine order and destroying chaos to create civilization.
There exists several ancient inscriptions in which the god Ashur explicitly orders kings to extend the borders of Assyria. A text from the reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I states that the king received a royal scepter and was commanded to "broaden the land of Ashur". A similar inscription from the reign of Ashurbanipal commands the king to "extend the land at his feet".
The king was also tasked with protecting his own people, often being referred to as a "shepherd". This protection included defending against external enemies and defending citizens from dangerous wild animals. To the Assyrians, the most dangerous animal of all was the lion, used as an example of chaos and disorder due to their aggressive nature. To prove themselves worthy of rule and illustrate that they were competent protectors, Assyrian kings engaged in ritual lion hunts. Lion-hunting was reserved for Assyrian royalty and was a public event, staged at parks in or near the Assyrian cities. In some cases, the hunt even took place with captive lions in an arena.
Legitimacy
As opposed to some other ancient monarchies, such as ancient Egypt, the Assyrian king was not believed to be divine himself, but was seen as divinely chosen and uniquely qualified for the royal duties. Most kings stressed their legitimacy through their familial connections to previous kings; a king was legitimate through his relation to the previous line of great kings who had been chosen by Ashur. Usurpers who were unrelated to previous kings usually either simply lied about being the son of some previous monarch or claimed that they had been divinely appointed directly by Ashur.Two prominent examples of such usurpers are the kings Tiglath-Pileser III and Sargon II. The inscriptions of these kings completely lack any familial references to previous kings, instead stressing that Ashur himself had appointed them directly with phrases such as "Ashur called my name", "Ashur placed me on the throne" and "Ashur placed his merciless weapon in my hand".
Assyrian kings
Early Assyrian rulers
Early names in king lists
The Assyrian King List includes a long sequence of rulers before Assyria's first confidently attested kings, though it is suspected by modern scholars that at least portions of this line of rulers are invented since none of the names are attested in contemporary records and many of the names of the earliest rulers rhyme. This is further corroborated by the absence of certain figures in the list known to have ruled in Assur before the Puzur-Ashur dynasty. The Synchronistic King List diverges from the Assyrian King List and considers Erishum I, the fourth king of the Puzur-Ashur dynasty, to be the first king of Assyria. Though it includes earlier names, the Assyrian King List does not list the length of the rule of any king before Erishum I.Given that the earliest rulers are described as "kings who lived in tents", they, if real, may not have ruled Assur at all but rather have been nomadic tribal chieftains somewhere in its vicinity. As in the Sumerian King List, several names may also have belonged to rulers who were contemporaries/rivals, rather than successors and predecessors of one another. Some researchers have dismissed these names as a mixture of Amorite tribal-geographical names with no relation to Assyria at all. It is possible that the 'kings who were ancestors', who are not attested in any other sources as present at Assur, refer to the ancestors of Shamshi-Adad I, given that other sources claim that his father was named Ilu-kabkabu, and they might thus not have been kings of Assyria, but rather rulers of Terqa, Shamshi-Adad's supposed ancestral home. Including these figures may have served to justify Shamshi-Adad's rise to the throne, either through obscuring his non-Assyrian origins or through inserting his ancestors into the sequence of Assyrian kings.
The early portion of the Assyrian King List contains these otherwise historically unverified names:
Kings who lived in tents
Kings who were ancestors
The kings are listed in reverse order in the AKL, starting from Aminu and ending with Apiashal.
Kings named on bricks
There are six of them, including three kings that are part of the Old Assyrian empire from Puzur-Ashur I to Ilu-shuma.