Smashed by ISIS, a 2,700-year-old carving may have been the earliest-known depiction of Jerusalem |
For millennia, hundreds of vivid bas-reliefs adorned the walls of the Nineveh palace of the legendary eighth-century BCE Assyrian king Sennacherib, depicting daring conquests richly described in Assyrian sources and the Hebrew Bible.
In 2016, Islamic State terrorists entered the palace, in modern-day Mosul, Iraq, and systematically smashed the artifacts. The long-surviving sculptures had enabled modern scholars to compare biblical information on Sennacherib with historical sources and archaeological findings since the 19th century. Had they not been destroyed, they would have likely had more to offer.
Among the treasures broken in the terror group’s campaign of destruction was a slab of stone that had adorned Sennacherib’s opulent throne room, which scholars long ago concluded depicts the Assyrian siege of the Philistine city of Eltekeh.
But new research analyzing photographs and drawings of the largely overlooked bas-relief before its destruction suggests that it actually shows Jerusalem, making it the oldest-known depiction of the city.
Current scholarship holds that the Madaba map, a mosaic found in a sixth-century CE Byzantine church in modern-day Jordan, is the oldest rendering of Jerusalem to survive to modern times. But the study, published in October in the prestigious Journal of Near Eastern Studies by University of South Africa researcher Stephen Compton, suggests that the southwest palace in Nineveh was home to a depiction 1,200 years older than the one in Madaba.
“This is a unique image of the Assyrian army leaving a foreign city and leaving it intact, and it fits with both Sennacherib’s account of what happened in Jerusalem and the Bible,” Compton told The Times of Israel via telephone.
The throne room contained at least 33 carved panels showing the exploits of Sennacherib, whose reign lasted from 705 to 681 BCE.
“Sennacherib’s throne room was the largest room of the palace, 167 feet long,” Compton said.
British archaeologists carried out systematic excavations of the site as early as the mid-19th century, documenting their finds in detailed drawings. The most well-preserved slabs were moved to London and remain on display at the British Museum.
They include bas-reliefs from another room in the palace that depict Sennacherib’s destruction of the Judean city of Lachish, likely during the same campaign in 701 BCE in which he would lay siege to Jerusalem.
Sennacherib’s Annals record that military campaign — the Assyrian king’s third — in which his army swept through Phoenicia and down the Levantine coast, eventually attacking the inland kingdom of Judah, which was backed by Egypt, a major Assyrian rival.
According to accepted research that campaign is depicted on the right wall of the throne room in a series of slabs showing three conquered sites, though the identity of the places seen has been the subject of a longstanding debate among researchers.
The section includes slab 28, which depicts an elaborate city wall and a single figure holding an object atop a stately building. Researchers generally associated that carving as showing the Assyrian defeat of Egypt at Eltekeh, a town in the Judean lowlands where Sennacherib recorded a major military victory over the Egyptians and Philistines.
Some two decades ago, Swiss scholar Christoph Uehlinger considered the possibility that slab 28 might actually depict Jerusalem, but did not reach a definitive conclusion one way or the other.
In his study, Compton takes the idea a step further, offering a new evaluation of the sequence of images and offering several arguments to support the claim that Jerusalem is the correct interpretation of the now-smashed slab, its city wall surrounded by the Assyrian army, the city’s royal palace within, and the solitary figure that of the Bible’s King Hezekiah.
Among the arguments offered by the PhD candidate is the fact that the picture appears to jibe with accounts of Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem. While the Biblical........