8. Traditions decline

During the early years, the Eponym List kept to a fairly regular pattern. The king served as eponym in the second year of his reign; the turtanu (commander of the army) was the next eponym, and so on down the pecking order of court officials and provincial governors.

Had this sequence continued to the end of the List, the dates of kings and hence the List could be directly linked to astronomical observations. Regrettably, the pattern is often irregular and the names of the last kings of the era do not appear on the List. Consequently the absolute dating of the eponyms was arrived at in a roundabout way.