Ashur-nirari V
Ashur-nirari V | |
---|---|
Adaside dynasty | |
Father | Adad-nirari III |
Ashur-nirari V (
At this time, the Assyrian officials were becoming increasingly powerful relative to the king, and Assyria's enemies were growing more dangerous. An unusually small share of Ashur-nirari's reign was devoted to campaigns against foreign enemies, perhaps suggesting domestic political instability within Assyria. In 746 or 745 BC, there are records of a revolt in Nimrud, the Assyrian capital. Ashur-nirari was succeeded by Tiglath-Pileser III, either his son or brother, but it is unclear in what manner. Though it is traditionally assumed that Tiglath-Pileser deposed Ashur-nirari, it is also possible that it was a smooth and legitimate succession, or that for a brief time they were co-rulers.
Reign
Ashur-nirari V was a son of Adad-nirari III (r. 811–783 BC). He succeeded his brother Ashur-dan III as king of Assyria in 755.[2] Ashur-nirari ruled during an obscure period in Assyrian history, from which little information survives.[3] As a result, his reign is poorly known.[4] During this obscure time, the Neo-Assyrian Empire experienced a period of decline. In particular, the power of the king himself was being threatened due to the emergence of extraordinarily powerful officials, who, while they accepted the authority of the Assyrian monarch, in practice acted with supreme authority and began to write their own cuneiform inscriptions concerning building and political activities, similar to those of the kings.[5] Such inscriptions by officials are more common from this time than inscriptions from the kings themselves.[3] At the same time, the enemies of Assyria grew stronger and more serious. This period of Assyrian decline, for instance, coincided with the peak of the northern Kingdom of Urartu.[6]
Inscriptions from after Ashur-nirari's reign that mention him include the
Succession
Ashur-nirari is generally regarded to have died in 745 BC, as this was the year of his successor Tiglath-Pileser III's accession.[2][4][11] The nature of Tiglath-Pileser's rise to the throne is not clear, particularly because ancient sources give conflicting accounts of his lineage. The Assyrian King List states that Tiglath-Pileser was the son of Ashur-nirari V, but in his own inscriptions Tiglath-Pileser claimed to be the son of Adad-nirari III and thus Ashur-nirari's brother.[12] Given that there are records of a revolt in Nimrud, the capital of the Assyria, in 746/745 BC,[13][14] and that Tiglath-Pileser in his inscriptions attributes his rise to the throne as a result of divine selection rather than his royal ancestry, he is typically assumed to have usurped the throne from Ashur-nirari.[13]
In her 2016 PhD thesis, the historian Tracy Davenport advanced the hypothesis that Tiglath-Pileser may have succeeded entirely legitimately and had even briefly been co-ruler with Ashur-nirari. Davenport based this idea primarily on oddities in the sequence of eponyms under Tiglath-Pileser, an unusual horizontal line in the list of eponyms after 744 BC (which might mark Ashur-nirari's death) and the Assyrian King List giving Ashur-nirari a reign lasting 10 years. Since the Assyrians counted reign lengths from the first full year of a king, Ashur-nirari's first year was reckoned to be 754 BC which means he would have ruled for 10 years only if he died in 744 BC.[15] The Assyrian King List is however not without known errors and there are for some earlier kings discrepancies between different versions of the list.[16]
References
- ^ Crouch 2014, p. 102.
- ^ a b Chen 2020, p. 200.
- ^ a b Grayson 2002, p. 239.
- ^ a b c d e Grayson 2002, p. 246.
- ^ Grayson 2002, p. 200.
- ^ a b Grayson 1982, p. 276.
- ^ Frahm 2016, p. 83.
- ^ a b CDLI.
- ^ a b Grayson 1982, p. 277.
- ^ Grayson 1982, p. 278.
- ^ Davenport 2016, pp. 36–37.
- ^ Chen 2020, pp. 200–201.
- ^ a b Davenport 2016, p. 36.
- ^ Radner 2016, p. 47.
- ^ Davenport 2016, pp. 37–41.
- ^ Hagens 2005, pp. 27–28.
Sources
- Chen, Fei (2020). Study on the Synchronistic King List from Ashur. Leiden: ISBN 978-90-04-43091-4.
- Crouch, Carly L. (2014). Israel and the Assyrians: Deuteronomy, the Succession Treaty of Esarhaddon, and the Nature of Subversion. Atlanta: ISBN 978-1-62837-026-3.
- Davenport, Tracy (2016). Situation and Organisation: The Empire Building of Tiglath-Pileser III (745-728 BC) (PDF) (PhD thesis). University of Sydney.
- Frahm, Eckart (2016). "Revolts in the Neo-Assyrian Empire: A Preliminary Discourse Analysis". In Collins, John Joseph & Manning, Joseph Gilbert (eds.). Revolt and Resistance in the Ancient Classical World and the Near East: In the Crucible of Empire. Leiden: ISBN 978-90-04-33017-7.
- Grayson, Albert Kirk (1982). "Assyria: Ashur-dan II to Ashur-Nirari V (934–745 B.C.)". In Boardman, John; ISBN 0-521-22496-9.
- Grayson, Albert Kirk (2002) [1996]. Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC: II (858–745 BC). Toronto: ISBN 0-8020-0886-0.
- Hagens, Graham (2005). "The Assyrian King List and Chronology: a Critique". Orientalia: NOVA Series. 74 (1): 23–41. JSTOR 43076931.
- ISBN 978-90-04-33017-7.
- "The Neo Assyrian Eponyms". Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. 14 October 2015. Retrieved 11 December 2021.