Sargon II’s “Ashdod” - the Strong Fort of Lachish. Part Two: Archaeology of Lachish.
by
Damien F. Mackey
Sargon II and
Sennacherib are, in my estimation, just two sides of the one coin.
And Sargon’s
“Ashdod” is the same strong fort as Sennacherib’s Lachish.
Now,
archaeologically speaking, which level of Lachish is the relevant one for this
period of the neo-Assyrian invasions of King Hezekiah’s Judah?
Introduction
My earlier view of a necessarilly
substantial co-regency between Sargon II and Sennacherib, which is not at all the
conventional view, gathered such impetus in my post-graduate thesis,
A
Revised History of the Era of King Hezekiah of Judah
and its Background
that I found myself drawing the
conclusion, ultimately, that Sargon II and Sennacherib must have been the one,
same neo-Assyrian king. I refer any interested readers to my detailed
discussion of this in Volume 1, Chapter 6 (“Assyria”) of my thesis.
A summary of this new theory was
published in SIS’s C and C Workshop
(2010:1) under the title of SIS’s choice, “Sargon II and Sennacherib” (http://www.sis-group.org.uk/chronology-catastrophism-workshop-8-issues-2008-2010-abstractsextracts.htm).
And I have since written an up-dated version
of this as:
Assyrian King Sargon II, Otherwise Known As Sennacherib
Sargon II, Sennacherib, seemed to me to
be ‘two sides of the one coin’ as I wrote in my thesis (pp. 141-142):
Other factors seemingly in favour
of the standard view that Sargon II and Sennacherib were two distinct kings may
be, I suggest, put down to being ‘two sides of the same coin’. For example, one
might ask the question, in regard to Russell’s statement: “...
Nineveh, where there is little
evidence of Sargon’s activities”:
- Why would so
proud and mighty a king as Sargon II virtually neglect one of Assyria’s most
pre-eminent cities, Nineveh?
- Conversely,
why did Sennacherib seemingly avoid Sargon’s brand new city of Dur-Sharrukin?
- Again, why did
Sennacherib record only campaigns, and not his regnal years?
Bright muses without much
confidence upon a possible later discovery “of Sennacherib’s official annals
for approximately the last decade of his reign (if such ever existed)”. ….
Further, as regards this ‘economy’
factor in inscriptions, we shall see in Section Two that, wherever Sargon II
goes into detail about a particular campaign, Sennacherib tends to be brief;
and vice versa.
One perhaps cannot say whether
there was any marked personality difference ‘between’
Sargon II and Sennacherib (by way
of trying to find any distinctions between the ‘two’), because, as Russell has
concluded, after an exhaustive study of Sennacherib, “we actually know little
about the man”. ….
[End of quote]
Fort of Lachish
Still flipping
the ‘coin’, with Sargon II coming out ‘heads’ and Sennacherib, ‘tails’, I
arrived at the further conclusion that Sargon II’s “Ashdod” must have been Sennacherib’s
Lachish.
I recently
up-dated this, too, in:
Sargon II’s “Ashdod” - the Strong Fort of
Lachish
Though no scholar of whom I am aware
would doubt the real existence of, now Sargon II, now Sennacherib - known from
historical records and the scriptures, e.g. Isaiah 20:1 (“Sargon”) and Isaiah
36:1 (“Sennacherib”) - it is always re-assuring when one can identify an
underlying archaeology.
Archaeology
of Lachish
Nor did I neglect this all-important factor
of archaeology in my thesis, though my contribution was not original, but fully
reliant upon the authors of Centuries of
Darkness: A Challenge to the Conventional Chronology of
Old World Archaeology (Jonathan Cape, London, 1991). These, Peter James et al., had veered away
from the usual view that Lachish level III pertained to the invasion of
Sennacherib, preferring Lachish level IV for this.
I, being in agreement with this, wrote (thesis, p.
383):
Lachish
James has produced a plausible
argument that Lachish IV is actually the stratigraphical
level for Sennacherib’s
destruction; with Lachish III - usually thought to relate to Sennacherib -
belonging to the time of Nebuchednezzar (c. 587 BC) and Lachish II to the
Persian era of Nehemiah (c. 440 BC); tying it all in with information from the
famous Lachish Letters. …. “[Ussishkin’s] main conclusion [that Lachish III
pertained to Sennacherib] … was actually based on a negative argument – the
elimination of the
other possible
candidates for the city supposedly laid waste and burnt by Sennacherib”.
From our reconstruction we now
know that Lachish (‘Ashdod’) was not burned down at
the time by the Assyrians. Rohl
likewise identifies the city of Hezekiah’s time, besieged
by Sennacherib, as “Stratum IV”.
….
[End of quote]
Lately, reading through Centuries of Darkness again, I was
struck by the excellent biblico-historical correspondences that the authors
have been able to discern between, particularly, Level II (and the Lachish
Letters) and the era of Nehemiah (section: “The ‘Lachish Letters’,” pp. 171-175),
thereby managing to resurrect a supposedly missing Persian period.
Level III, thought to have been the
phase for Sennacherib, is now to be identified with the destructive work of
Nebuchednezzar II, of the Chaldean era; whilst Level IV, as said, pertains to
Sennacherib (my Sargon II) (section: “Lachish III: Sennacherib or Nebuchedrezzar?”,
pp. 176-180).
Conclusion
Thanks to James et al., the strong fort
of Lachish has, at last, a properly identified series of archaeological phases,
which also verify the biblical data.
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