page_title: Ashurbanipal
section_title: Succession and chronology
hierarchical_section_title: Ashurbanipal / Reign / Succession and chronology
caption_attribution_description: English: Gardens of Ashurbanipal
context_page_description: Ashurbanipal, also spelled Assurbanipal, Asshurbanipal and Asurbanipal was the king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from the death of his father Esarhaddon in 668 BC to his own death in 631 BC. The fourth king of the Sargonid dynasty, Ashurbanipal is generally remembered as the last great king of Assyria.
  At the time of Ashurbanipal's reign, the Neo-Assyrian Empire was the largest empire that the world had ever seen and its capital, Nineveh, was probably the largest city on the planet. Selected as heir by his father in 672 BC despite not being the eldest son, Ashurbanipal ascended to the throne in 669 BC jointly with his elder brother Shamash-shum-ukin, who became king of Babylon. Much of the early years of Ashurbanipal's reign was spent fighting rebellions in Egypt, which had been conquered by his father.
  The greatest campaigns of Ashurbanipal were those directed towards Elam, an ancient enemy of Assyria, and against Shamash-shum-ukin, who had expected to be an equal to Ashurbanipal and began to resent the overbearing control his younger brother held over him.
context_section_description: The end of Ashurbanipal's reign and the beginning of the reign of his successor, Ashur-etil-ilani, is shrouded in mystery on account of a lack of available sources. The annals kept by Ashurbanipal, the main sources to his reign, end in 636 BC, possibly because the king was ill. Inscriptions by Ashur-etil-ilani suggest that his father died a natural death, but do not shed light on when exactly this happened. Before archaeological excavations and discoveries in the 1800s, Ashurbanipal was known by the name Sardanapalus, based on the writings of the ancient Greeks, and had been misidentified as the last king of Assyria. One popular story of his end was that Sardanapalus had burnt himself, his concubines and servants alive, along with his entire palace at the Fall of Nineveh in 612 BC (almost twenty years after the actual Ashurbanipal died).
  Although Ashurbanipal's final year is often repeated as 627 BC, this follows an inscription at Harran made by the mother of the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus nearly a century later. The final contemporary evidence for Ashurbanipal being alive and reigning as king is a contract from the city of Nippur made in 631 BC. To get the attested lengths of the reigns of his successors to match, it is generally agreed that Ashurbanipal either died, abdicated or was deposed in 631 BC. 631 BC is typically used as the year of his death. If Ashurbanipal's reign had ended in 627 BC, the inscriptions of his successors Ashur-etil-ilani and Sinsharishkun in Babylon would have been impossible, as the city was seized by Nabopolassar in 626 BC, and never again fell into Assyrian hands.
  One possible way to justify a 42-year reign of Ashurbanipal is by assuming there was a coregency between him and Ashur-etil-ilani, but there had never been a coregency in prior Assyrian history and the idea is explicitly contradicted by Ashur-etil-ilani's own inscriptions which describe him as ascending to the throne after the end of his father's reign. It is possible that the 42-year error came about in later Mesopotamian historiography on account of the knowledge that Ashurbanipal ruled concurrently with Babylonian rulers Shamash-shum-ukin and Kandalanu, whose reigns together amount to 42 years, but Kandalanu survived Ashurbanipal by three years, dying in 627 BC.
  Another once popular idea, for instance defended by Polish historian Stefan Zawadski in his book The Fall of Assyria (1988), is that Ashubanipal and Kandalanu were the same person, "Kandalanu" simply being the name the king used in Babylon. This is considered unlikely for several reasons. No previous Assyrian king is known to have used an alternate name in Babylon. Inscriptions from Babylonia also show a difference in the lengths of the reigns of Ashurbanipal and Kandalanu; Ashurbanipal's reign is counted from his first full year as king (668 BC) and Kandalanu's is counted from his first full year as king (647 BC). All Assyrian kings who personally ruled Babylon used the title "King of Babylon" in their own inscriptions, but it is not used in Ashurbanipal's inscriptions, even those made after 648 BC. Most importantly, Babylonian documents treat Ashurbanipal and Kandalanu as two different people. No contemporary Babylonian sources describe Ashurbanipal as King of Babylon.
  Ashurbanipal was succeeded as king by his son, Ashur-etil-ilani, and he seems to have been inspired by the succession plans of his father as another of his sons, Sinsharishkun, was granted the fortress-city of Nippur and was designated to be the successor of Kandalanu at Babylon once Kandalanu died.
caption: The luxurious palace and gardens of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, with original color reconstitution. Irrigation canals radiate from an aqueduct. The king appears under the porch. British Museum.[64][65]
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