Three New Kings of Assyria

In this paper, the very recent discovery of three overlooked 1st-millennium BC kings of Assyria by the presenter and Eckart Frahm (Yale University) is outlined, and some of its consequences for Assyrian and biblical history explored.

The first of these is a new rebel king Tiglath-pileser who rose up against his nephew Aššur-dān III in 763 BC (most likely in the wake of a dramatic solar eclipse) and was enthroned in Aššur, before being toppled again by Aššur-dān III's forces. The second is a new Shalmaneser who we assume succeeded Aššur-nārārī V to the Assyrian throne late in 747 BC but lost his throne to Tiglath-pileser III a little more than a year later in 745 BCE. The third is earlier in date, a short-lived Aššur-uballiṭ whose reign was usurped by Adad-nārārī II in 912* BC. Each king was enthroned at Aššur, and enjoyed support from some, if not all of Assyria, but was subsequently defeated or deposed. Evidence of the partial erasure of two of these kings from the historical record can be identified.

The new insights thus gained into the treacherous realities of Assyrian kingship demonstrate that the Assyrian King List is not a reliable list of all Neo-Assyrian rulers, but rather of those who reigned long and successfully enough to be included by its editors in an idealised, consecutive order. This reframes our perspective on the motivations behind the compilation of this remarkable text, and the nature of Assyrian kingship itself, and offers some food for though for those wrestling with fraught biblical historiography.

Dr. Alexander Johannes Edmonds and Prof. Eckart Frahm published a 2026 study titled "Three New Kings of Assyria" in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies. Their analysis challenges the long-standing assumption that the Assyrian King List preserves a complete sequence of first-millennium BCE rulers.

By re-examining cuneiform evidence from the tenth and eighth centuries BCE, the study argues that three short-lived rulers were omitted from the idealized sequence preserved by the Assyrian King List. The research therefore has implications not only for Assyrian chronology, but also for the political history of the early Neo-Assyrian Empire, patterns of rebellion and succession, and the ideological construction of royal historiography.

The University of Münster described the discovery publicly in August 2026 as evidence for three previously unknown rulers of the Assyrian Empire. The EHJ presentation carries the same title as the peer-reviewed 2026 study and provides an opportunity to present this recent research to the conference audience.

Dr. Alexander Johannes Edmonds is an Assyriologist specializing in the history and literature of the first millennium BCE. He is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Philology in the Governance in Babylon (GoviB) project at the University of Münster's Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Near Eastern Archaeology, a position he has held since November 2024.

He studied Archaeology and Anthropology with a focus on Assyriology at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, completing a B.A. (Hons) in 2011. He then completed an M.A. in Assyriology and Semitic Languages at Heidelberg University in 2013. His doctorate at the University of Tübingen reassessed the expansion and rise of the early Neo-Assyrian Empire; it was defended in 2019 with magna cum laude.

Before joining the GoviB project, Edmonds served as a guest professor at Northeast Normal University in Changchun and as a visiting fellow at the University of Münster's Cluster of Excellence "Religion and Politics." His research interests include Neo-Assyrian political history, kingship and empire, Akkadian and Aramaic, Mesopotamian literature, chronology, and historical geography.