UsefulCharts Gets Assyria’s Last King Wrong—and Misreads How Its Empire Worked

An empire that conquered Egypt, dominated Babylon, and ruled much of the ancient Middle East deserves more than a succession of names and expanding borders. It deserves an accurate account of how its power was acquired, exercised, resisted, and ultimately destroyed.

UsefulCharts' Ancient Assyrian Kings Family Tree offers an accessible history of the Middle and Neo-Assyrian empires. Its combination of royal genealogy and changing territorial maps makes a complicated history easier to follow.

But several of its most consequential claims fail when compared with surviving inscriptions and established historical research.

The video describes Babylon as conquered when Assyria was actually intervening to preserve its king. It identifies the wrong monument as the earliest Assyrian reference to Israel. It assigns Egypt's original conquest to the wrong ruler. And it calls Ashurbanipal the final Assyrian king, overlooking the successors who fought for the empire's survival.

These are not merely disputes about dates. They change the relationships between rulers, the meaning of military campaigns, and the explanation of how one of antiquity's greatest empires disappeared.

1. Babylon Was an Ally Before It Became a Conquest

The video states that Babylon was conquered during the reign of Shalmaneser III, who ruled Assyria from approximately 858 to 824 BCE.

That description turns a complicated political relationship into a military takeover.

The surviving evidence tells a different story.

In the middle of the ninth century BCE, Babylon was ruled by Marduk-zakir-shumi I. His younger brother, Marduk-bel-usate, rebelled against him, dividing the Babylonian kingdom.

Shalmaneser III intervened on behalf of the reigning Babylonian king.

Assyrian inscriptions describe campaigns against the rebel brother, his defeat, and the restoration of Marduk-zakir-shumi's authority.

The account is unusually explicit. A surviving royal inscription records Shalmaneser's intervention and states that he confirmed Marduk-zakir-shumi on his father's throne.

The Penn Museum's research project on ancient Nimrud explains that Assyria and Babylonia maintained a relationship governed by diplomatic agreements. Shalmaneser's military assistance fulfilled an obligation to support his Babylonian counterpart.

A surviving Assyrian throne base even depicts the two kings clasping hands.

None of this means the relationship was necessarily equal. Assyria possessed considerable military leverage, and historians have debated the extent of Babylon's subordination.

But military supremacy, political influence, and territorial conquest are different things.

Shalmaneser did not simply remove Babylon's king and absorb his kingdom into Assyria. He helped defeat a rebellion and preserved the reigning dynasty.

That distinction becomes especially important because Babylon later remained capable of interfering in Assyrian politics.

The actual transformation came much later.

In 729 BCE, Tiglath-Pileser III defeated the Babylonian ruler Mukin-zeri and took the Babylonian crown himself. This was a fundamentally different arrangement: the Assyrian king personally assumed kingship over Babylon.

The video's account compresses these distinct political relationships into repeated episodes of conquest.

That compression removes something historically important: Babylon was not merely territory that Assyria repeatedly gained and lost. It was a powerful civilization whose rulers could negotiate, resist, cooperate, and challenge Assyrian authority.

2. The Black Obelisk Was Not Assyria's First Reference to Israel

The video presents Shalmaneser III's Black Obelisk as the earliest known Assyrian artifact mentioning ancient Israel.

That claim is incorrect.

An earlier monument commissioned by the same king already contains an identifiable reference to Israel.

The Kurkh Monolith, associated with Shalmaneser's campaign of 853 BCE, records the Battle of Qarqar.

At Qarqar, an alliance of regional rulers confronted the Assyrian army.

Among them was Ahab, king of Israel.

The inscription identifies Ahab as an Israelite and credits him with a substantial military contribution, including 2,000 chariots and 10,000 troops.

Those figures should not be accepted automatically. Ancient royal inscriptions frequently exaggerated enemy strength to magnify the ruler's achievements, and historians have questioned the particularly large chariot total attributed to Ahab.

Nevertheless, the reference to Ahab is historically significant.

It places an identifiable Israelite king within an independently documented international military confrontation.

The Black Obelisk records a later relationship.

Around 841 BCE, Jehu, king of Israel, presented tribute to Shalmaneser III.

The monument depicts the submission and records valuable offerings, including precious metals and ceremonial objects.

The distinction is revealing.

In 853 BCE, Ahab participated in a military coalition opposing Assyria.

Roughly twelve years later, Jehu acknowledged Assyrian supremacy through tribute.

Those two records capture a change in Israel's position within the regional balance of power.

The episode misses this transition by treating the later monument as the beginning of Assyrian evidence about Israel.

There is another genealogical complication.

The Black Obelisk identifies Jehu using an expression conventionally translated as belonging to the House of Omri.

Yet Jehu was not a biological descendant of Omri. He had overthrown the previous royal house.

The expression reflects Assyrian political terminology rather than literal parentage.

For a video devoted to royal family trees, that is a particularly valuable distinction. Ancient dynastic labels could identify a kingdom even after the ruling family had changed.

The video is correct that the Black Obelisk preserves an exceptionally early visual representation of an Israelite ruler. Its significance is considerable.

But the earliest Assyrian textual reference to Israel belongs to the earlier Kurkh inscription.

Confusing the two sacrifices a much more interesting historical story: Israel's movement from armed resistance to political submission within a single generation.

3. Egypt Was First Conquered by Esarhaddon, Not Ashurbanipal

The video reaches its greatest territorial expansion under Ashurbanipal, the famous Assyrian king who ruled during the seventh century BCE.

It then describes Assyria conquering Egypt and removing its Kushite pharaoh.

The central problem is chronology.

Egypt had already been conquered by Ashurbanipal's father, Esarhaddon.

In 671 BCE, Esarhaddon invaded Egypt, defeated the forces of the Kushite pharaoh Taharqa, and captured Memphis.

The British Museum identifies the conquest of Egypt in 671 BCE as one of Esarhaddon's defining achievements.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art independently confirms that the invasion broke Kushite control and that the Assyrians established local dependent rulers in the Nile Delta.

Among them was Necho I of Sais.

This matters because the video credits Ashurbanipal with replacing a Kushite pharaoh and installing a subordinate Egyptian ruler.

That political arrangement had already begun under Esarhaddon.

Ashurbanipal certainly conducted major Egyptian campaigns.

Assyrian control remained contested. Kushite rulers attempted to recover their former territories, forcing repeated military intervention.

Following further conflict, Assyrian forces advanced into Upper Egypt and sacked Thebes in 663 BCE.

The later campaigns helped terminate Kushite control over Egypt, although Kushite kings continued ruling farther south.

Both father and son therefore played consequential roles.

Esarhaddon achieved the initial conquest and established the first arrangements for Assyrian domination.

Ashurbanipal fought to preserve and reestablish that domination against renewed Kushite resistance.

The distinction changes the political history.

The conquest was not one extraordinary victory belonging to one king. It was a prolonged struggle involving invasion, retreat, restoration, local rulers, and repeated attempts to impose control.

By collapsing that sequence into Ashurbanipal's reign, the video gives the wrong ruler credit for the initial conquest and obscures the unstable nature of Assyria's Egyptian possessions.

4. Ashurbanipal Was Not the Last Assyrian King

The video's most consequential mistake arrives near the end.

It identifies Ashurbanipal as the final Assyrian king.

He was not.

This is established by surviving royal inscriptions, Babylonian chronicles, and modern historical scholarship.

After Ashurbanipal, Assyria continued under several rulers.

His sons Ashur-etel-ilani and Sin-shar-ishkun both held the Assyrian throne.

Another short-lived ruler, Sin-shumu-lishir, also appears in the surviving king lists.

The precise chronology of these final decades remains difficult to reconstruct, and historians disagree about some regnal dates.

But the existence of these rulers is not in serious dispute.

The Cambridge Ancient History explicitly discusses Ashurbanipal's successors and identifies Ashur-uballit II as the last king of the declining Assyrian state.

That distinction matters enormously.

The video creates the impression that Assyria reached its territorial peak under Ashurbanipal, suffered internal conflict after his death, and then disappeared.

The real collapse involved decades of political instability, rebellion, and devastating warfare.

In 612 BCE, Babylonian and Median forces besieged Nineveh, Assyria's great imperial capital.

The Babylonian Fall of Nineveh Chronicle, preserved in the British Museum, records the siege and destruction of the city.

Sin-shar-ishkun died during the catastrophe.

Yet Assyrian resistance continued.

Ashur-uballit II established himself at Harran and attempted to preserve what remained of the kingdom.

His position became increasingly desperate.

The Babylonians and Medes continued their campaigns, while Egypt provided military assistance to the surviving Assyrian forces.

In 609 BCE, Ashur-uballit II and his Egyptian allies attempted to recover Harran.

They failed.

After this unsuccessful campaign, Ashur-uballit disappears from the surviving historical record.

There is a remarkable reversal here.

Egypt, which Assyria had invaded and subjected during the previous century, was now helping the last Assyrian king resist destruction.

That is a far more revealing conclusion than the simple statement that Assyria collapsed because it had become overextended.

Imperial overstretch may have contributed to Assyria's vulnerability. Internal conflicts certainly weakened the state.

But the decisive destruction came through identifiable military campaigns conducted by identifiable enemies.

Babylonian ruler Nabopolassar and the Median forces associated with Cyaxares played central roles.

Calling Ashurbanipal the final king eliminates the very rulers and wars through which Assyria actually fell.

For a documentary organized around royal succession, omitting the final succession is not a minor oversight. It removes the ending from the story.

5. The Maps Show Conquest but Barely Explain Imperial Control

There is a deeper weakness running through the episode.

Its historical explanation relies heavily on kings conquering territories and passing power to their descendants.

That framework is useful for establishing chronology, but it leaves much of Assyria's imperial machinery unexplained.

The Neo-Assyrian Empire was not built through battlefield victories alone.

It developed an extensive administrative system involving provincial governors, taxation, military organization, and the forced relocation of conquered populations.

Tiglath-Pileser III was especially important in this transformation.

His reign brought changes in how conquered territories were governed.

Rather than simply defeating regional rulers and demanding tribute, Assyria increasingly converted conquered kingdoms into provinces administered by imperial officials.

Its army also became more professional and incorporated soldiers drawn from conquered territories.

These reforms helped transform Assyria from a kingdom exerting influence over neighboring states into a more directly administered territorial empire.

The changes carried a substantial human cost.

Assyrian authorities systematically relocated populations across the empire.

Some communities were removed from politically sensitive territories to weaken local resistance. Others were settled in regions where their labor, agricultural knowledge, or specialist skills could serve imperial needs.

The policy affected farmers, craftsmen, soldiers, and political elites.

The surviving correspondence reveals that these transfers were organized administrative operations, not simply uncontrolled expulsions following battle.

The Penn Museum's Assyrian Empire Builders project explains how resettlement supported agricultural development, the construction of cities, and the accumulation of specialized knowledge.

The scale was enormous, although estimates of the total number of deportees remain uncertain.

These policies help explain how Assyria could maintain an empire far larger than its original heartland.

They also reveal what territorial expansion meant for ordinary people.

A map changing color may indicate a conquest. It does not explain the destruction of local political institutions, the appointment of foreign governors, or the relocation of families.

Those consequences were not incidental to Assyrian imperial power.

They were among the mechanisms through which that power operated.

6. Babylon's Resistance Explains More Than Repeated Conquest

The episode repeatedly returns to Babylon as a territory gained, lost, and regained by successive Assyrian kings.

But Babylon's relationship with Assyria was much more than a sequence of military victories.

It became one of the empire's most persistent political problems.

In 689 BCE, Sennacherib captured and devastated Babylon following rebellion.

The destruction was extraordinary because Babylon was not merely another conquered city. It occupied an exceptional religious and cultural position within Mesopotamia.

Assyrian rulers themselves revered Babylonian religious institutions.

Sennacherib's successor, Esarhaddon, adopted a different approach.

He undertook the restoration of Babylon and attempted to repair relations with its inhabitants.

He also arranged a divided succession.

Ashurbanipal became king of Assyria, while another son, Shamash-shuma-ukin, received the Babylonian throne.

This was an attempt to govern two closely connected political centers while preserving distinct royal institutions.

It failed to secure lasting peace.

Shamash-shuma-ukin eventually rebelled against his brother.

The resulting war lasted approximately four years and culminated in another devastating siege of Babylon.

Ashurbanipal emerged victorious and placed Kandalanu on the Babylonian throne.

The episode's simplified narrative misses this extraordinary chain of decisions.

An Assyrian king destroyed Babylon. His successor rebuilt it. That successor divided royal authority between his sons. The arrangement collapsed into a war between brothers.

And within a generation, Babylon became the center of the political movement that destroyed the Assyrian Empire.

The Metropolitan Museum's historical account documents this sequence using surviving inscriptions, archaeological evidence, and records of Babylonian kingship.

This is not an unrelated detail that a short educational video could reasonably omit without consequence.

It explains why Babylon mattered so much to Assyria and why the empire's eventual defeat was not simply an unexpected consequence of territorial overextension.

The struggle over Babylon was embedded in the empire's political structure long before its final collapse.

The Verdict: A Family Tree Cannot Replace Imperial History

The central weakness in Ancient Assyrian Kings Family Tree is not that its presenter attempts to simplify a complicated subject.

Simplification is necessary in introductory history.

The problem begins when simplification changes the facts.

A military intervention becomes a conquest. A later monument becomes the earliest historical reference. A son's campaigns absorb his father's achievement. A powerful king becomes the last king despite the documented existence of his successors.

More importantly, the narrative places royal succession at the center while giving comparatively little attention to the institutions and conflicts that explain Assyrian power.

The surviving evidence presents a more complicated empire.

Its kings negotiated with rivals as well as conquering them. Its armies fought repeated campaigns to preserve territories already claimed. Its administrators reorganized conquered societies through provincial government and forced resettlement.

And its destruction was not an anonymous collapse following the death of a great ruler.

It was the result of political struggles and military campaigns whose principal participants can still be identified.

The irony is that the evidence required to correct the video's most consequential errors is not hidden in obscure private collections.

Much of it is available through major museum collections, scholarly editions of royal inscriptions, and established histories of ancient Mesopotamia.

UsefulCharts provides a framework for remembering Assyrian kings.

But readers who rely on this episode alone risk remembering several of the most important relationships, achievements, and events incorrectly.

A history of kings must do more than identify who wore the crown. It must establish what those kings actually did—and who came after them.

References

1. Ancient Assyrian Kings Family Tree — UsefulCharts, YouTube.
Original work under review; publication date not verified. The supplied transcript establishes the video's claims about Babylon, Israel, Egypt, Ashurbanipal, and the final collapse of Assyria.

2. Shalmaneser III, King of Assyria — Nimrud: Materialities of Assyrian Knowledge Production, University of Pennsylvania, circa 2019.
Documents Shalmaneser's intervention in Babylonian succession politics, the restoration of Marduk-zakir-shumi, and the commemorative depiction of the two kings.

3. Shalmaneser III 059 — Royal Inscriptions of Assyria Online, University of Pennsylvania.
Provides a translated Assyrian inscription explicitly describing Shalmaneser's military assistance to the Babylonian king and the restoration of his authority.

4. The Kurkh Monolith and Black Obelisk — Nathan Steinmeyer, Biblical Archaeology Society, November 25, 2022.
Establishes the earlier reference to Ahab of Israel at Qarqar in 853 BCE and distinguishes it from Jehu's later tribute depicted on the Black Obelisk.

5. Esarhaddon — British Museum, collection biography.
Identifies Esarhaddon as the Assyrian ruler responsible for the conquest of Egypt in 671 BCE.

6. Egypt in the Third Intermediate Period — Marsha Hill and James P. Allen, Metropolitan Museum of Art, originally 2004; revised 2018.
Documents the initial Assyrian conquest, the establishment of Egyptian vassal rulers, and subsequent campaigns against Kushite resistance.

7. The Fall of Assyria (635–609 B.C.) — Joan Oates, The Cambridge Ancient History, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Establishes the succession after Ashurbanipal and identifies Ashur-uballit II among the final rulers while acknowledging uncertainties in the chronology.

8. Fall of Nineveh Chronicle — Babylonian Chronicle, British Museum collection BM 21901; translated and presented by Livius.
Provides contemporary-derived historical evidence of the Babylonian and Median campaigns, Nineveh's destruction, and Ashur-uballit II's unsuccessful attempt to recover Harran.

9. Babylon — Michael Seymour, Metropolitan Museum of Art, originally 2016; revised May 27, 2026.
Documents Babylon's destruction under Sennacherib, reconstruction under Esarhaddon, the conflict between Ashurbanipal and Shamash-shuma-ukin, and Babylon's eventual emergence as Assyria's successor.

10. Mass Deportation: The Assyrian Resettlement Policy — Assyrian Empire Builders, University of Pennsylvania.
Explains how forced population transfers, labor allocation, agricultural development, and provincial administration contributed to the operation of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.