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relief. Museum number. 124911. Description. Gypsum wall panel relief; carved in low relief; Sennacherib watches the capture of Lachish. He sits on a throne and watches as prisoners are brought before him and executed. A tent is behind him; there is a chariot in the foreground and bodyguards stationed around.
- Assyria
- Lachish
- Victors and Vanquished
- The Siege of Lachish Reliefs
By 701 BCE the Assyrian kings, based in Nineveh (modern-day Mosul Governorate, Iraq), built their enormous empire. It stretched from modern-day Iran to Egypt and covered most of the modern-day Middle East. The Assyrian Empire was the largest land empire yet created, the product of the prodigious Assyrian war-machine. The Assyrian heartland on the T...
Lachish (modern-day Tell ed-Duweir, Israel), lies about 800 kilometres south-west of the Assyrian heartland, but only 40 kilometres south-west of Jerusalem. It was a critical point, linking Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean and the immense wealth of Egypt. By 701 BCE, Lachish was a heavily fortified city, located on a hill. It was the 2nd city, afte...
“Him” refers to Hezekiah, King of Judah. This is what is written in Book of the Kings, but the Bible understandably glosses over the disagreeable fact that the ruler of the great Assyrian Empire, Sennacherib, the terror of the Middle East, responded aggressively, without showing any mercy. Sennacherib mobilised his massive, professional, well-train...
Sennacherib recorded this victorious military campaign in a series of wall reliefs, which decorated Room XXXVI of his South-West Palace at Nineveh. These reliefs were probably painted, but even without any colours, they are astonishing historical documents, just like a film in stone. The reliefs were about 2.5 meters in height and would have run in...
Carved between 700 and 681 BCE, as a decoration of the South-West Palace of Sennacherib in Nineveh (in modern Iraq ), the relief is today in the British Museum in London, [1] and was included as item 21 in the BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects by the museum's former director Neil MacGregor.
relief. Museum number. 124907. Description. Gypsum wall panel relief: showing booty from Lachish and booty from governor's palace, including a bundle of scimitars, round shields, a chariot, a throne and incense burners. Below, Judaean prisoners move in families, taking goods and animals into exile. Authority. Ruler: Sennacherib. Cultures/periods.
The British Museum has a superb set of relief carvings which depicted the siege in some detail. It shows the Assyrian soldiers firing arrows, and slingstones, and approaching the walls of Lachish using mudbrick ramps.
Situated in a room in the British Museum, the Lachish reliefs depict an ancient and animated scene of conquest, occupation, depopulation, and deportation that took place around 700 B.C. These large stone panels excavated and removed from the Palace of the Assyrian King Sennacherib in Nineveh in northern Iraq show a heated battle scene of a ...
