Sargonic and Ur III periods (ca. 2334-2025 BC)

VA 5009 (Ass 16317a). Figure of a priest; Aššur Temple. Akkadian-Ur III period Harper/Klengel-Brandt/Aruz/Benzel, Assyrian Origins (1995), p. 12 and pl. 3 (no. 12).

The rulers listed in this first section below are men who held authority in the city of Aššur during the second half of the third millennium BC and whose documents (or the documents mentioning them) were recovered during the excavations of that city at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although it has been suggested that for certain periods (see, e.g., the introduction to Zarriqum) the Assyrian city enjoyed a sort of autonomy, the texts presented here belong to a time [http://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=old_akkadian] (from the hegemony of Akkad to that of the Third Dynasty of Ur) when Aššur had no true independence. The absence of the eponym system of dating, which was introduced only at the beginning of the second millennium (during the reign of Erišum I), makes the chronology of this period extremely difficult to understand. This must have also been the case some centuries later when the men compiling the Assyrian King List [/riao/kinglists/assyriankinglist/index.html] (AKL) tried to fit information about rulers from this (for them as well as for us) nebulous time into a plausible chronological sequence. Four of the men from this early period of Assyrian history were included in the AKL: Aminu, Sulilu (presumably identical to Ṣilulu), Kikkiya, and Akiya.

Rulers (in chronological order):

Nathan Morello

Nathan Morello, 'Sargonic and Ur III periods (ca. 2334-2025 BC)', RIA 1: Inscriptions from the Origins of Assyria to Arik-dīn-ili, The RIA Project, 2023 [http://oracc.org/earlybeginnings/ashursorigins/]