The variety in the appellations of seas attested in the Assyrian royal inscriptions from different times essentially originated in scribal efforts to renovate the use of geographical terminology. In course of time most of the terminological components went through changes in usage. A representative case is tâmtu elenitu ša šalamu šamši, “the upper sea of the setting sun”. This term originally designated Lake Van in the texts of Tighlath-pileser I, but some four hundred years later the same term was used to refer to the Mediterranean in the texts of Sennacherib. We recognize two major factors behind this phenomenon.
One was the creation of the term “the sea of the setting sun” (tâmtu ša šulmu šamši) to designate the Mediterranean in the reign of Shalmaneser III. This term became a common appellation of the Mediterranean in later Assyrian inscriptions, and in the texts of Sargon II it was almost the exclusively-used term for the Mediterranean.
The other factor was the establishment of tâmtu elitu (upper sea) as a major appellation for the Mediterranean in the late Neo-Assyrian period. Here we deal with two similar but originally distinguished terms, t. elenitu and t. elitu, both literally meaning “upper sea”. The former had been applied for the first time to the Mediterranean in the later texts of Tiglathpileser I (t. elenitu ša mat amurri, “the upper sea of Amurru”), departing from its original usage for Lake Van as attested in the texts of Tukluti-Ninurta I as well as those of Tiglath-pileser I himself. On the other hand, t. elitu, though it had been a classical term for the Mediterranean in the Mesopotamian tradition since the Old Akkadian period, usually forming a pair with “the lower sea” (t. šaplitu), i. e., the Persian Gulf, was not used as a major term in the Assyrian royal inscriptions until the reign of Tilath-pileser III. When Sennacherib's scribes revived within the royal epithets the archaic expression for Lake Van, “the upper (elenitu) sea of the setting sun”, it was undoubtedly regarded just as a variant of the current term for the Mediterranean, “the upper (elitu) sea of the setting sun”.
