Introduction

Adad-nīrārī III ruled Assyria during a tumultuous period of Assyria’s early imperial phase from 810 to 783. Historians identify the period from the end of Shalmaneser III’s reign to the succession of Tiglath-pileser III (823– 745) as one of imperial downturn, political weakness and decentralisa- tion. In larger historical works, it is common for historians to gloss over this period and offer the reader very little in the way of detailed political history. Similarly, historians who work on Assyrian royal ideology have focused on the greater kings such as Ashurnasirpal II, Shalmaneser III, Tiglath-pileser III and the Sargonids. Since scholarship has focused on the more glorious periods with larger corpuses of textual material, monarchs like Adad-nīrārī III have not been analysed to the same extent as other Assyrian rulers. In this study we fill part of this gap by undertaking an historical and ideological analysis of Adad-nīrārī III’s reign. The historical chapters of this study offer a deeper understanding of the political history of the period by concentrating on the areas of our knowl- edge that are poorly understood, such as chronology, political relations, the routes of military campaigns, and the roles of Sammu-ramāt and the officials in the administration. Previous studies have looked at some of the historical aspects of this reign, but none has taken an all-encompassing approach like the one offered here. The chapters on ideology offer the opportunity to expand our understanding of Assyrian royal ideology by examining the inscriptions of a king in a period when the imperial drive was not expansive. We will see how Adad-nīrārī conformed to, and varied from, his predecessors and what those (in)consistencies indicate about the relationship between ideology and politics.

The Study in Its Assyriological Context

M. F. Fales has recently called for movement in Assyriology away from the study of a specific, narrow topic to that of the all-encompassing works in the style of A. T. E. Olmstead’s and S. Mowinckel’s pioneering studies.1 With the progress and near completion of the major international

1 Fales 1999–2001, p. 121. 2 introduction

Assyriological projects such as the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia Project (RIM) and Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period (RINAP), the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project (SAA, SAAS), the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD) and the Reallexikon der Assyriologie (RLA), Fales’ goal is far more attainable than previously possible. However, there is still much to be gained in Assyriology and ancient Near Eastern studies from the study of a chronologically narrow topic, such as one Assyrian king’s reign. Clearly other scholars concur, as evidenced by the appearance of a number of monographs from the 1990s-on devoted to particular Assyrian kings, Ashurnasirpal II,2 Shalmaneser III,3 Tiglath-pileser III,4 Sargon II,5 Sennacherib,6 Esarhaddon7 and Ashurbanipal,8 as well as countless arti- cles and chapters. Thus, the current study, which examines the inscrip- tions from the period of Adad-nīrārī III’s reign is not only well suited to current scholarship, but also needed. The historical study of Assyrian royal inscriptions began soon after the decipherment of the Akkadian language in the middle of the nine- teenth century, but we may identify Olmstead’s 1916 text-critical study of Assyrian royal inscriptions as the beginning of the modern phase of historiography in Assyriology.9 His study on the development of Assyr- ian historical writing by representative monarchs from the Middle and Neo-Assyrian periods followed the methods L. von Ranke championed in historical studies and laid the foundation for the study of Assyrian royal inscriptions in the twentieth century.10 However, it was not until after the Second World War that Assyriologists began to undertake large-scale historical or textual examinations of particular Neo-Assyrian monarchs’ inscriptions. The relatively late shift to deeper historical analysis is under- standable because the Assyriological focus in the twentieth century was on the translation of cuneiform documents, updating grammars and sign- lists, and the development of a comprehensive dictionary. Without such tools and resources, accurate assessment of the history of Assyria was not

2 Liverani 1992a. 3 Schneider 1991 and 1993; and S. Yamada 2000. 4 Tadmor 1994; and Tadmor and S. Yamada 2011. 5 Fuchs 1994 and 1998. 6 Frahm 1997. 7 Porter 1993; and Leichty 2011. 8 Borger 1996. 9 Olmstead 1916. 10 For a summary of von Ranke’s combining philology with history and his influence on the nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarship see Gooch 1959, pp. 72–121; and Evans 1997, pp. 18–22.