rear me" ("rear" meaning to care for someone until they're fully grown), found in one of his inscriptions. However, the same phrase appears in a prayer by Ashurbanipal and Aššur-etil-ilāni is unlikely to have been very young as he is attested to have had male children during his reign. Reign Aššur-etil-ilāni ascended the throne after the death of his father Ashurbanipal in 631 BC. A land grant from Aššur-etil-ilāni to his (a general serving him since he was a young boy) Sîn-šumu-līšir suggests that Ashurbanipal died a natural death. As in many other successions in Assyrian history, Aššur-etil-ilāni's rise to the Assyrian throne was initially met with opposition and unrest. The same land grant to Sîn-šumu-līšir references the actions of an Assyrian official called Nabu-riḫtu-uṣur who with the help of another official, Sîn-šar-ibni, attempted to usurp the Assyrian throne. Sin-shum-lishir probably assisted the king with stopping Nabu-riḫtu-uṣur and Sîn-šar-ibni. As no sources indicate the opposite, the conspiracy appears to have been crushed relatively quickly. Excavations at Nineveh from the time around Ashurbanipal's death show fire damage, indicating that the plot perhaps resulted in some violence and unrest within the capital itself. The spread of inscriptions by Aššur-etil-ilāni in Babylonia suggest that he exercised the same amount of control in the southern provinces as his father Ashurbanipal had, having a vassal king (Kandalanu) but exercising actual political and military power there himself. His inscriptions are known from all the major cities, including Babylon, Dilbat, Sippar and Nippur. Too few inscriptions of Aššur-etil-ilāni survive to make any certain assumptions about his character. Excavations of his palace at Kalhu, one of the more important cities in the empire and a former capital, may indicate that he was less boastful than his father as it had no reliefs or statues similar to those that his predecessors had used to illustrate their strength and success. The lack of such depictions may partly be because there are no records of Aššur-etil-ilāni ever conducting a military campaign or going on a hunt. His Kalhu palace was quite small with unusually small rooms by Assyrian royal standards. It is possible that some of Assyria's vassals used the reign of what they perceived to be a weak ruler to break free of Assyrian control and even attack Assyrian outposts. In 628 BC, Josiah, ostensibly an Assyrian vassal and the king of Judah in the Levant, extended his land so