Siege of Lachish

Lachish, a fortified hilltop city in the lowlands south-west of Jerusalem, was stormed by the army of the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 701 BCE during his campaign to crush a revolt in the Levant. Its fall is one of the best-documented events of the ancient Near East: it is described in the Hebrew Bible, recorded in Assyrian royal texts, carved in detail on the walls of Sennacherib's palace, and confirmed by excavation, including the oldest siege ramp yet found anywhere.

When the Assyrian king Sargon II died in 705 BCE, several small states in the Levant stopped sending tribute to his successor. Among them was the kingdom of Judah under Hezekiah, who had been encouraged by Egypt. In 701 BCE Sennacherib marched west to restore control. Sidon and Ashkelon were stormed, other states quickly submitted, and an Egyptian force sent to help the city of Ekron was beaten. The army then turned on Judah, capturing walled towns such as Azekah.

Lachish was the second city of Judah, standing on a steep mound about 53 kilometres south-west of Jerusalem. Because the northern slope was the steeper, the Assyrians are thought to have attacked from the south. Archers and slingers on both sides traded volleys while Assyrian engineers piled stone and earth into a ramp against the wall. Battering rams were hauled up it, the wall was breached and the city was stormed. Some defenders tried to flee down the far side of the hill.

According to the palace reliefs, the city was plundered, its people led away in family groups with their animals and belongings, and officials blamed for the revolt executed, some by flaying. Excavation has turned up hundreds of arrowheads along the ramp and the summit of the wall, and some 1,500 skulls in a cave close by. The destruction layer known as Level III is dated to 701 BCE, although a minority of scholars have argued that Lachish fell during a later Assyrian campaign around 688 BCE.

Sennacherib gave an entire room of his South-West Palace at Nineveh, in modern Iraq, to carved alabaster panels showing the siege. They depict ramps, rams, archers sheltering behind wicker screens, captives and the king enthroned as the spoils are paraded before him. The panels were uncovered by the excavator Austen Henry Layard between 1845 and 1847 and are now in the British Museum. The size and central placement of the series, the only battle scene Sennacherib is known to have commissioned, suggest how much the victory mattered to him.

From Lachish, according to both the Bible and Assyrian records, Sennacherib sent officers to demand Jerusalem's surrender. His annals boast that he captured 46 walled cities of Judah, deported 200,150 people and shut Hezekiah in Jerusalem "like a bird in a cage", but they do not claim the city was taken. Hezekiah kept his throne in return for a heavy tribute, including, by the Assyrian account, 30 talents of gold and 800 of silver. The biblical account instead says an angel struck down 185,000 Assyrians outside the walls. Historians debate whether disease, exhaustion or simple negotiation ended the campaign.

Lachish was later reoccupied, and according to the Book of Jeremiah it was one of the last Judean towns to hold out against the Babylonians before the siege of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. The ruins, known as Tel Lachish, are now a national park in Israel. Earlier in the same century Assyria had already destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, leaving Judah as a weakened vassal.

Our 700 BCE map, the year after the siege, shows the Levant under Assyrian domination.