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1 min read History

Assyria Erased Three Kings From History, Almost

The record of who sat on Assyria's throne stood unquestioned for a century of scholarship. Then two historians found what the empire tried to scrub out.
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Three kings ruled one of the ancient world's most powerful empires. Then somebody erased them.

A study published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies, co-authored by Eckart Frahm of Yale and Alexander Johannes Edmonds of the University of Münster, re-examined poorly preserved cuneiform texts and found that three short-lived kings, previously scrubbed from the official record, ruled Assyria during periods of political upheaval in the 10th and 8th centuries BCE. The Assyrian King List, long considered a reliable accounting of the empire's rulers, turns out to have been missing some names.

The scholars identified three forgotten rulers: an Aššur-uballiṭ who briefly held the throne around 913 to 912 BCE before being overthrown; a Tiglath-pileser who seized power during a rebellion in 763 to 762 BCE before being deposed; and a Shalmaneser who reigned around 747 to 745 BCE before losing out to the famous Tiglath-pileser III. None of the three held power for more than two years.

Frahm thinks successors scrubbed each ruler from the record on purpose. Aššur-uballiṭ appears to have been the rightful heir, pushed aside by a rival prince, one who Frahm suspects had little interest in advertising the shady circumstances of his own rise to power.

The real revelation isn't that the King List was wrong: it's that it was never meant to be complete. It was a curated selection of rulers the Assyrians chose to remember. Beyond adding three names to the royal succession, the research reframes Assyria's rise as the ancient Near East's first great empire: not a smooth, uninterrupted ascent, but a kingdom that clawed through succession crises, epidemics and internal conflict to get there.

Winning, in ancient Assyria, meant controlling not just the throne but the record of who had ever sat in it.

Read the full story at Yale News, July 9, 2026

Hot Take: The Assyrian King List wasn't a historical document. It was a performance review with the unflattering entries deleted. Turns out ancient propaganda has a shelf life of about 2,800 years.

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