A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [57]
Lachish was just one victim in a long series of Assyrian wars. Its story is particularly fascinating because we also know it from the other side, from the Hebrew Bible. The Book of Kings tells us that Hezekiah, King of Judah, refused to pay the tribute that Sennacherib demanded:
And the Lord was with him: and he prospered whithersoever he went forth: and he rebelled against the king of Assyria, and served him not.
Siege engines lead the way up artificial ramps with archers following closely behind
The Bible understandably glosses over the disagreeable fact that Sennacherib responded by brutally seizing the cities of Judah until Hezekiah was crushed, gave in and paid up.
The resounding success of the Assyrian campaign is recorded in these carvings in shallow relief, about eight feet (2.5 metres) high. They would have run in a continuous frieze almost from floor to ceiling around one room of Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh, near modern Mosul in Iraq. They would once have been brightly painted, but even without any colour today they are astonishing historical documents – like a film in stone, an early Hollywood epic, perhaps, with a cast of thousands. The first scene shows the invading army marching in, then comes the bloody battle in the besieged town, and then we move on to the dead, the injured and the columns of passive refugees. Finally we see the victorious king presiding triumphantly over his conquest: Sennacherib, ruler of the great Assyrian Empire, and the terror of the ancient Middle East.
Like the director of any good propaganda war film, the sculptor has shown us the Lachish campaign as a perfectly executed military exercise. He sets the city among trees and vineyards, while below the Assyrian soldiers, archers and spearmen are marching. As the frieze progresses, wave after wave of Assyrians scale the city walls and eventually overwhelm the resident Judaeans. The next scene shows the aftermath. Survivors flee the burning city, carrying what they can. These lines of people, carrying their worldly goods and heading for deportation, must be one of the earliest depictions of refugees that exists. They are almost unbearably poignant. It’s impossible, looking at them close up, not to think of the millions of refugees and displaced people that this same region has seen over the centuries, and is still seeing.
Prisoners of war and refugees are led away from Lachish
We showed the Lachish Reliefs to Lord Ashdown, soldier, politician and international diplomat, who’s had long experience of the human cost of military conflict, especially during his work in the Balkans:
I saw refugee camps right across the Balkans and, frankly, I could never stop the tears coming to my eyes, because what I saw was my sister and my mother and my wife and my children. But I saw Serbs driven out by Bosnians, Bosnians driven out by Croats, Croats driven out by Serbs, and so on. I even saw the most shameful refugees of all … the Roma people, a huge camp of Roma people, maybe 40–50,000, and they were driven out when my army, the NATO army, was in charge. And we stood aside as their houses were burnt and they were driven from their homes. And that made me feel not just desperately sad, but also desperately ashamed. What is true, and what the reliefs show, is in a sense the immutable and unchangeable character of war. There are always wars, there are always deaths, there are always refugees. Refugees are normally the sort of flotsam and jetsam of war. They are left where they were washed up when the war finished.
The people that we see on the relief are the victims of war who pay the price of their ruler’s rebellion. Families with carts packed high with bundles are being led into exile, while Assyrian soldiers carry their plundered spoils towards the enthroned King Sennacherib. An inscription credits