The Accession of Sinsharishkun

Abstract

There are serious obJections to all the current reconstructions of Assyrian history during the 620s. They demand that some of the endence should be reJected, and that there should be regular double-dating or an extraordinary number of coups in several Babylonian cities. The purpose of this article is to show that, even if we accept that scribes normally dated contracts by the regnal year of the king or pretender controlling their district, a simpler solution is available. It is compatible with all the texts, and accounts for the recognized anomalies in two of them; it only requires some mild speculation, and the abandonment of some unnecessary preconceptions. I have borrowed ideas freely from other scholars an(l there is no need here to criticize individually the chronological schemes they have suggested; all but one of them are considered impllcitly below, and the exception, Borger's, has been adequately refuted elsewhere.2 AWy debt to Borger may best be demonstrated by omitting references to many of the relevant c3ntracts and other texts; he collected nearly all of them in 1965, and disoussed them where necessary; his remarks will have to be consulted anyway, and it would be expensive and futile to repeat every detail.