Lachish Reliefs

Cut Out of a Palace Wall at Nineveh

In 1847, in the last months of his first Nineveh campaign, Austen Henry Layard was working through the South-West Palace of Sennacherib on the mound of Kouyunjik when he opened a room since catalogued as Room XXXVI. Its walls were lined with carved gypsum panels, and unlike most Assyrian palace reliefs these did not show a generic enemy in a generic landscape. They showed one siege, in sequence, around a single room, with an epigraph naming the city.

No individual finder is recorded, and none should be invented. The digging was done by local labourers under Layard and his foreman Hormuzd Rassam, and the excavation records name nobody for this room. Rassam is often credited with the Lachish reliefs and should not be: his own celebrated discoveries at Nineveh — the North Palace, the library of Ashurbanipal — belong to 1853 and later. The panels were shipped to London and are in the British Museum, registered in the 1856,0909 series; the best known of them is BM 124911. A full inclusive range of registration numbers circulates online and could not be confirmed, so it is not repeated here.

The Siege, Drawn by the Besiegers

The panels run from the Assyrian camp through the assault to the aftermath. Archers and slingers advance behind wicker screens; siege engines with battering rams climb a ramp built against the city wall while defenders drop torches on them; the wall is defended and then breached. Below, a column of prisoners files out with bundles, ox-carts and children, and three men are shown impaled outside the gate. At the right end the king sits on a throne in a hilly landscape, and a cuneiform epigraph beside him reads, in the standard translation, that Sennacherib, king of the world, king of Assyria, sat on a throne while the booty of Lachish passed before him.

That is 2 Kings 18:14 from the other side of the wall. Scripture places Sennacherib at Lachish twice — Hezekiah sends his surrender payment there, and the Assyrian delegation that goes up to Jerusalem is dispatched from there — and 2 Chronicles 32:9 says plainly that the king was before Lachish with all his forces. The excavated city agrees with the picture: the siege ramp shown on the panels is a real feature at Tel Lachish, the earliest siege ramp known anywhere, and the destruction layer above it is thick with Assyrian arrowheads, sling stones and scale armour. It is very rare to have a biblical event, a contemporary enemy account, a contemporary enemy picture and the ruined site itself, and this is the clearest case of all four.

What Fixed the Date, and What the Room Does Not Say

All of that depends on one argument that took fifty years to settle. The destruction layer at Lachish is Level III, and the excavator J. L. Starkey, following W. F. Albright, assigned it to Nebuchadnezzar's campaign of 597 BC — more than a century after Sennacherib. Olga Tufnell, who published Starkey's material after his murder, argued for 701 BC instead, and D. Ussishkin's renewed excavations from the 1970s onward made that case decisively: the pottery of Level III belongs with the eighth century, the siege ramp is Assyrian in construction, and Level II is the layer Nebuchadnezzar burned. Ussishkin's dating is now the consensus. It is worth naming the argument rather than skipping to the answer, because until it was settled the reliefs could not be tied to any particular biblical moment at all.

Two limits on what the room proves. It is royal propaganda, commissioned by the king it flatters, and it says what he wanted said — which is why the impaled prisoners are there and why nothing in it goes wrong for Assyria. And there is a silence in it. Sennacherib decorated an entire room of his palace with the fall of Lachish and did not decorate one with the fall of Jerusalem, which his own annals never claim to have taken; his boast there is that he shut Hezekiah up like a bird in a cage. That absence fits 2 Kings 19's account of a siege that lifted, and it is a fair thing to notice. It is not the same as evidence for how the siege lifted, and an argument from what a propagandist left out will only ever be suggestive.

Scripture references

• 2 Kings 18:13-14 — Sennacherib takes the fortified cities of Judah; Hezekiah sends tribute to him at Lachish
• 2 Kings 18:17 — The Assyrian delegation to Jerusalem is sent from Lachish
• 2 Chronicles 32:9 — "He was before Lachish, and all his power with him"
• Jeremiah 34:7 — Lachish still standing, and nearly alone, in Judah's last war

Sources

• Holding institutionRINAP 3: The Royal Inscriptions of Sennacherib, King of Assyria (Oracc) — Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period project, University of Pennsylvania Museum · The open online edition of Sennacherib's own inscriptions, including the third-campaign account of 701 BC in which Hezekiah is shut up like a bird in a cageSupports: The Assyrian account of the 701 BC campaign, and what it does and does not claim about Jerusalem
• Holding institutionBritish Museum, Lachish relief panels (1856,0909 series; BM 124911) — The British Museum · The panels' registration series and the individual number BM 124911 are confirmed. The museum's collection database refuses automated requests, so it was not fetched for this article; a full inclusive range of panel numbers circulates online and is not repeated here because it could not be confirmedSupports: Current location and registration
• ScholarshipD. Ussishkin, The Renewed Archaeological Excavations at Lachish (1973-1994) — David Ussishkin, Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University · Monograph Series of the Institute of Archaeology 22, Tel Aviv, 2004 — the excavation report that settled the Level III dating on the 701 BC side. Print onlySupports: The Level III dating dispute and the archaeology of the siege ramp
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Lachish reliefs

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Lachish reliefs

Reflect

The Assyrians carved their victory at Lachish and said nothing about Jerusalem. Where in your own life are you tempted to display only the room that flatters you?