Shamsi-Adad I (1717-1678 BCE), King of Assyria. He was an Amorite warlord who at a fairly young age, possibly less than 30 years old, usurped the kingship from the Assyrian king Erishum II. He was a conqueror in Syria, Anatolia and Upper Mesopotamia.
The reason that Shamsi-Adad acted this way at such a young age is that he inherited the throne of Ekallatum from Ila-kabkabu, who was his father. After receiving the kingdom of Ekallatum, Shamsi-Adad was not content with it, but became a conqueror.
The Limmu list describes his rise to the kingship of Ekallatum by saying that "Shamsi-Adad entered his father's house". According to the limmu list, this happened around 1732 BCE, when Shamsi-Adad was only about 15 years old.
Board time
If you look at the earlier estimate (which appears in the treatise highlighted in the Blog Texts below), he reigned for 44 years and his reign as King of Assyria would have started in 1724 BCE. Now that I have studied the limmu list in more detail, it is necessary to make a change to this.
Researchers estimate that he became king a little later, apparently based on the following line of the limmu list:
“The eponym of Erishum, Shamsi-Adad won . . . ".
This relates to 1717 BCE. This may refer to King Erishum II. However, there is no full certainty about the meaning of this, there were other men named Erishum at that time. Using this assumption, it would appear that Shamsi-Adad had ruled for 39 years and his predecessor Erishum II for 9 years.
At this point, the solar eclipse recorded in the limmu list is taken into account. It is applied in 1746 BCE. solar eclipse that occurred. This solar eclipse occurred approximately in the 24th year of Naram-Sin's reign.
End of term of office
It seems that the line of the limmu list that relates to 1680 BCE tells about the last full-fledged reign year of Shamsi-Adad. It tells about the battle against the people of Turku and the people of Jamin. Both of Shamsi-Adad's sons, Ishme-Dagan and Yasmah-Adad, were involved in the battle.
Probably Shamsi-Adad died soon after 1679 BCE. in the early months. That year's line in the limmu list has been corrupted. From that we can find out that there was a battle in the region of Saggaratum, which apparently belonged to the kingdom of Mari. Then there are the very significant words:
“A total of . . . years"
The conclusion can be drawn from this that it told the length of a king's reign. While Yasmah-Adad may have died in that battle, it is also likely that Shamsi-Adad died at that time.
This conclusion is influenced by the reign of Hammurabi, the king of Babylon, and the reign of Mari's next king, Zimri-Lim.
Here, the so-called extremely low chronology. According to it, Hammurabi's reign ended in 1654 BCE. He became the king of Mari about 12 years earlier, no later than the beginning of 1665 BC. around (here it is good to remember that in ancient times a calendar was used where the year started in spring and ended in the following spring). Based on the available archaeological data, Zimri-Lim ruled for about 15 years. This leads to the conclusion that Zimri-Lim's reign began in 1679 BC at the latest.
Scholars have assumed that his reign ended in the 18th year of the Babylonian king Hammurabi's reign. In this shallow chronology, it would be 1679 BCE. or 1678 BCE. It depends on what month Hammurabi became king.
In theory, the battle described above in the territory of the Mari kingdom could have ended in the winter of 1678 BCE. This is because the line in the limmu list, the time representing the ancient calendar year, ended in the spring of 1678 BCE.
Lunar eclipse
Archaeological records tell of a letter from Asqudum, a former servant of King Yasmah-Adad of Mari, to Zimri-Lim. This probably relates to the time when Zimri-Lim had already taken the kingship of Mari.
In a letter, Asqudum tells about the lunar eclipse he observed in Mari. Since lunar eclipses were believed to be ominous at the time, Asqudum may have attracted attention in March 1679 BCE. to the lunar eclipse that happened. It may have been dated to the end of the reigns of Shamsi-Adad I or Yashman-Adad or both.
Hi Pekka, I have been reading your various posts over a number of years. Like you, I am an amateur researcher seeking for an absolute chronology based on facts not assumptions.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that lunar eclipses and planetary observations are much more reliably back-calculated than solar eclipses because the change in the speed of earth's rotation, like the radiocarbon calibration curve, is not linear but affected by changing sea levels as a result of global cooling and warming. These can have a major impact on the calculation of the appearance of eclipses at different points on the earth's surface. They scarcely however the earth's or moon's orbits.
What would be very helpful in your posts is to distinguish clearly between dates in the consensus chronology (NCUSES?) and those corrected dates which you are proposing, together with a calculation for dates inferred from records (e.g. 662+20+7-4+8=693).
These you could summarise in a table at the end of every few posts like this:
Event Source Consensus Proposed
Death of T-P III Limmu list 727 25 Tebetu 726 BCE
~ 26 January
In many cases with the earliest records, and especially for Egypt, we only have 'hanging' timelines - and the search is still on to anchor these to factual fixed points, rather than to daisy-chain them on to each other.
My own project is to correlate these dates with other chronologies such as comets, tree rings, ice cores, microtephra in lake varves, so that the major drivers of history - famines and floods - can fit into a unified timeline - without getting into debates as to which professor's interpretation of which ostracon or intercalary month is cleverer.