The Assyrian Eponym Lists

limmu lists

Anonymous / tradition (Assyrian royal chancery) · c. 9th-7th century BC (the classical Neo-Assyrian eponym canon; the practice is far older) · Ashur (Iraq) · history

Naming each year after an appointed official rather than a regnal count, and recording a solar eclipse in the year corresponding to 763 BC, this dating system argues, more durably than any royal boast, for its own continued usefulness, since it remains the fixed anchor modern scholars use to calculate absolute Mesopotamian chronology.