Arda-Mulissu

Disappointed by this demotion, Arda-Mulissu was the chief orchestrator of a 681 BC conspiracy in which he and one of his younger brothers, Nabu-shar-usur, murdered Sennacherib in the hopes of seizing the throne.

[7] In 700 BC, Sennacherib had appointed his eldest son, Ashur-nadin-shumi, as the crown prince (designated heir) and gave him rule of Babylonia, which covered the southern Mesopotamian provinces of his empire.

In response to this incursion into their territory, the Elamites invaded the southern parts of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and in 694 BC successfully captured Ashur-nadin-shumi at the city of Sippar.

[9] Assyriologists Simo Parpola and Theodore Kwasman have also suggested an alternative hypothesis, that Ashur-nadin-shumi was intended to succeed Sennacherib only in Babylonia and that Arda-Mulissu could have been appointed significantly earlier, perhaps already in 698 BC.

There are no surviving documents to affirm such an appointment, but Kwasman and Parpola based their hypothesis on a series of contracts, dated to 694 and 693 BC, which title Nergal-shumu-ibni as mār šarri.

[12] Arda-Mulissu concluded a "treaty of rebellion" with another of his younger brothers, Nabu-shar-usur (also known as Sharezer), and on 20 October 681 BC, they attacked and killed their father in one of Nineveh's (the capital of Assyria during their time) temples.

[17] The murder of Sennacherib, ruler of the mightiest empire on the planet at his time, was shocking to his contemporaries and was received with strong emotion and mixed feelings throughout Mesopotamia and the rest of the Ancient Near East.

In the Levant and in Babylonia the news was celebrated and proclaimed as divine punishment due to Sennacherib's brutal campaigns against these regions while in Assyria, the reaction was probably resentment and horror.

[12] A fictive account by the medieval Armenian historian Movses Khorenatsi (5th century AD) claims that Arda-Mulissu's descendants in Urartu became the Artsruni and Gnuni noble houses and that Nabu-shar-usur was made Bidaxsh.