For those interested in Assyrian history, brilliant Assyriologist (and friend) Alexander Johannes Edmonds has a new book coming out on April 21 that will make an enormous contribution to Assyrian history. Most notably, he has discovered two Assyrian kings that had been lost to history and also presents a third that was initially found by Ekhart Frahm.
You can’t beat the price! The ebook is currently available for free here:
Had an amazing time at the ASOR 2024 conference and seeing Boston. Below is the abstract from my presentation interspersed with the relevant slides (photos courtesy of Professor Takayoshi Oshima):
The Visual Storytelling on Sennacherib’s Throne-Room Wall: New Insights into His Invasions of Ushu and Jerusalem
In the largest ancient Assyrian room ever excavated, on the long wall to the right of Sennacherib’s throne, carved stone panels depicted his 701 BCE invasions of Phoenicia, Philistia, and Judah. It will be shown that the opening scene depicts his conquest of Ushu and locates this important Phoenician city at the site that later became Alexandroschene (Alexander the Great’s fortress against Tyre) and, still later, the Crusader fortress Scandelion.
The next scene depicts his triumph over Egyptian and Kushite cavalry and charioteers near Eltekeh in Philistia.
For the third and final scene, Christoph Uehlinger has proposed (and the context explored in this study confirms) that it depicts Jerusalem. However, unlike other besieged cities, Jerusalem is not shown being conquered, looted, or burned but surviving intact, its walls unbreached and its king, Hezekiah, alive and free. The rebels surviving cannot have been what Sennacherib intended to feature as the final image to the right of his throne. Rather, it will be argued that the four uncarved panels that followed were deliberately left blank in order to portray a planned return to and sack of Jerusalem. However, Sennacherib’s second invasion was forestalled by a massive tribute payment from Hezekiah and a rebellion in Babylon, leaving the final section of panels blank ever after.
In case anyone happens to be in the Milwaukee area, I’ve been invited to speak to the Milwaukee Area Biblical Archaeology Society and the Wisconsin Lutheran College:
Thrilled that my work tracking down Sennacherib’s military camps (and a few biblical sites) has been peer reviewed and published in the prestigious journal Near Eastern Archaeology.
Below is a link to the article. (Unfortunately, everything but the abstract is behind a paywall.)
The image below is a relief of King Sennacherib’s military camp that he had displayed on his palace wall. It is now prominently featured in the British Museum. The locations of his camps had never been found, so I spent several years tracking them down. The results were exciting and opened other historical doors, such as the locations of some lost cities that had been besieged by the Assyrians and were marked by such camps.
Below is Jebel el Mudawwara, which I argue was the site of Sennacherib’s Jerusalem siege camp. This camp was featured in three books of the Bible, in famous art (including by Ruben and Doré), and in the poetry of Lord Byron.
Below is the site that I identified as the location of Sennacherib’s camp during his siege of Lachish, the camp depicted in the relief above.
