Ashur-rabi II

He was a younger son of the earlier Assyrian monarch, Aššurnaṣirpal I. He succeeded his nephew Aššur-nerari IV's brief six year rule, and if this succession was like earlier usurpations by uncles of their nephews, it would have been a violent affair. The Assyrian Kinglist[i 1][i 2][i 3] records his accession and genealogy but provides no further information. His construction of the Bit-nathi, part of the temple of Ištar in Nineveh, was recalled in a dedicatory cone of Aššur-nāṣir-apli II (883–859 BC) commemorating his own repair work.[i 4]

Some Assyrian settlements on the Middle Euphrates were lost to the Arameans as they were able to cross the river and establish a network of autonomous but interrelated settlements that began to encroach on the Assyrian heartland.[2] Šulmānu-ašarēdu III recalled the loss of Ana-Aššur-utēr-aṣbat (Pitru, possibly Tell Aushariye) and Mutkinu, two towns close to Til Barsip, which had originally been taken and colonized by Tukultī-apil-Ešarra I around a hundred years earlier; in one of his inscriptions: "At the time of Aššur-rabi (II), king of Assyria, the king of Aram (Syria) took [two cities] by force—I restored these cities. I installed the Assyrians in their midst."[i 5] The king of Aram (šar₄ KUR-a-ru-mu) is unlikely to have been Hadadezer of Zobah, in southern Syria, but a northern Aram, in or near Ḫanigalbat.[3] His authority continued to stretch as far west as the Ḫārbūr river as recorded on the cylinder[i 6] of Bel-ereš, a šangû or governor of Šadikanni,[4] somewhat contradicting the picture of Assyrian retreat and decline painted elsewhere.[5]

His era must have stretched from the reigns of his Babylonian contemporaries, Simbar-Šipak (1025–1008 BC) to Nabû-mukin-apli (978–943 BC), although there is no extant contemporary proof of contact which might help fix this chronology more precisely. The Synchronistic Kinglist[i 7] gives his contemporary as Širikti-šuqamuna, a king of Babylonia who reigned just 3 months c. 985 BC. Severe distress and famine was recorded under Kaššu-nādin-aḫi (c. 1006–1004 BC), the midpoint in Aššur-rabi's reign, and this possibly points to the underlying cause of the Aramean migration.[6]

He was followed on the throne by his son, the equally obscure Aššur-reši-išši II, who ruled for five years.

• Albert Kirk Grayson (1991). Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC I (1114–859 BC). University of Toronto Press.